Hi all,
As promised, here is a list of thoughts and concerns about Wineconf 2022, presuming it is held with XDC.
First, XDC is attended by about 100-120 people, and usually has one main room, with scheduled tracks across three days, seemingly always a Wednesday-Friday. They also like to have a second room, which is mostly used as spillover, although there are sometimes scheduled work shops in that room that overlap with the main track.
Wineconf has historically been on a Saturday/Sunday. The idea there was to try to make it easier for people that don't work professionally on Wine to attend. I don't know if that rationale still holds. I'm particularly curious to hear from people that don't work professionally on Wine as to whether or not this would discourage them from coming. I doubt that XDC would be interested in a different schedule, so that then leads me to two ideas: hold Wineconf interleaved with XDC on all or some combination of the Wednesday/Thursday/Friday, or hold Wineconf on the Friday/Saturday, so as to overlap by only one day. My sense is that the experiment would be most interesting with a full interleaving, but I'm really curious what others think.
If we do the fully interleaved strategy, then I think we will want three rooms. We can schedule tracks in the two rooms, with one room being mostly X, and one room being mostly Wine, but with overlap allowed. The third room is social and spillover. That may be a bit of overkill. My sense is that both Wine and X.org have been running light on tracks of late, and so the added tracks from Wine may be enough to fill up the empty spaces left by X.org. But I think a little overkill is probably better than feeling like we're missing a room.
If we do the overlap option, then I'd probably just get two rooms, as I think x.org could give over their normal 'second' room to us for one day.
My thinking is to pin down some of these details, and then ask the Wine committee to approve Wineconf 2022 with those parameters so that we can submit an RFP to X.org.
Note that the deadline for RFPs to x.org is September 1, 2021, which is why I am bringing this up now.
I'd appreciate other thoughts and things I might have missed.
Cheers,
Jeremy