Now that we've moved to complaint mode...

I second what qole and others have said about discussion. In future summits it would be nice to adopt more of the co-create model IMO. We can decouple discussion from the schedule with a little more creativity and forethought (the IM suggestions would help here, likewise location-awareness).

And yeah, wifi was an issue. I could not make successful Gizmo or Google Talk calls at any time despite trying often. I'm suspecting a port and/or capacity issue (probably the latter: EIPI said he got Google Talk to work, whereas I sat right by him and could not).

I'm thinking it's never too early to lay sufficient groundwork for the next event (Summit or otherwise). This dialog needs to do more than erupt and fizzle... I'll do what I can to facilitate action.

I like the general idea, but in that case a few practical issues have to be dealt with. Namely, that not all folks are familiar enough with the things presented in the demo (transforming the following discussion to a FAQ) and the other, while most people present have a very good passive knowledge of English it gets more difficult when it comes to verbal discussions.

I would scrap 5-minute talks as too short, replacing them with a flexible choice of 10/15/20 minutes for everyone's talk. Would also mandate last 5 minutes of each talk for questions.

The long(er) talks were done that way. 20 minutes talk, 5 minutes questions, 5 minutes to set up for the next speaker.

How about we keep the current format, but with a different organisation.

20 minute talk, which will generate quite an amount of discussion afterwards, followed by a 5 or 10 minute talk. This would allow those who are very keen on discussing the subject to do so, while not impacting the longer talks that come after it.

The problem is that if we give longer pauses between each, we're going to end up with a week long Summit. There's only so much we can do in a day.

That being said, I found it maybe a bit troubling that at 6PM, everyone just left and was gone. As if there were more important things to do than the Summit. I understand full well that for some it is 100% work, and that they don't necessarily want to do over hours, but I'm sure for the biggest of the mass, this is a hobby, a project they enjoy and "do for fun" (regardless of the actual seriousness of their implication). Why then do we have to split up, and only be able to spend the evening with whomever we happen to have a better relationship with?

As much as I enjoy going out and listen to music, I don't think the Summit is the place for that. I remember a big ring of people outside the bar, where we could actually hear each other talk, discussing a variety of subjects, and just messing about. Exact same thing upstairs next to the toilets and cloak room. You had a bunch of people who were more interested in having good discussions whilst enjoying a nice drink rather than being deafened by the pounding sounds of distorted guitars and blinded by the Nokia logos all over the walls, all the whilst being irradiated by the blue drinks. (I'm mostly joking here, for those who missed it). I don't mind having a proper nice out, but then let's call it that, and I don't think the Maemo community, which is mainly composed by people who don't do clubbing is in the right mindset for that. What I'm trying to say is: let the people who want to go clubbing go, but also offer an alternative which allows for proper discussions to take place.

Then, the next day, there was the binge-drinking bar in the N900 room. Which was a lot better on a conversation base, but was too formal. I don't know why, but ALL the discussions were about Maemo. How come that one night, we had a mix of people talking about their kids or joking around, and the next night, everyone talking about projects, projects, projects. Was it the talks? Was it the feel of the evening? Was it because we were still in the N900 room?

No, I believe it was because, simply put, the second day, everyone was still wearing their maemodogtags. On the first night, most people chucked it away, most people went back to the hotel and changed, and knew they were going to a "party". On the second night, the drinking part of the party was brought to us, but I don't know if a lot of us went back to the hotel, took some time off to call the wife and kids, and then go out.

I'd like to see some tinkering about this, as I believe we can have an appropriate mix.

Talking about the DSP is fun. Granted. Talking about your boss pissed you off and you nearly missed your flight, over a nice pint, will make the former conversation 10 times more fun.

My 2c,

Considering the Sunday Schiphol train-mess I'd be suprised if the (nearly) missed flights would be a common subject for a whole lot of people

Something to ponder in terms of IM at future Summits. Could we not get everyone a "@maemo.org" or similar email address, hosted by Google. That way everyone is accessible via GTalk. In fact, that may just be useful in day to day dealings. You then just need to know that person's maemo.org username, ask for permission to IM them, and go from there.

In terms of the 5 minute talks - some went very well because the presenter obviously tailored their talk and demo for the 5 minutes. Many of the Fremantle Stars presentations, or Jaffa's Development Nirvana presentation are fine examples of this. Unfortunately, technical glitches can occur, such as what happened to lcuk in his liqbase presentation. In that particular case, I was surprised that the there wasn't a larger effort to get his TV out working (if that was the problem).

I think it would help in many ways if discussion was immediately taken out of the speaking rooms and into another informal venue. That provides room for more talks since speeches and Q&A can then be done in parallel rather than following speeches waiting for Q&A to conclude. Imagine the presenter leaving the stage and followed out to a communal Q&A venue by those with questions.

One risk though is that anyone who moves out into an open Q&A follow-up misses at least part of the next presentation. However, that can also be solved by allowing for offline Q&A that is subsequently published out to the community later or, better yet, fed dynamically using microblogging, SMS, et al.

EDIT: to build on this...

I believe we need formal themes for talk tracks. I noticed Quim Thanked that suggestion when I recently made it so that's encouraging to me. In conjunction, I see value in adding more microblogging tags besides just #maesum... such as track theme tags (eg #GPS, et al). This can help direct people to relevant info.

EDIT 2: I see value in brainstorming on theme tags in the time before the next event (not necessarily summit) and then creating a general badge template showing how those tags would be incorporated into future schedules. I will facilitate this effort.

If we could get link-local / Bonjour / Salut working properly, then we could all get that running and you'd be able to see the devices of all the people on the network and message them!

How about using something like maesum#gps. Each presentation would have this in a corner of the displays somewhere. Might be tricky if people want to do a demo directly from their device, unless we use overlay.

Another idea would be to have two projectors per talk. One projector would be the host's screen (slides, demo, etc), the other screen would display live feeds from twitter/internal Summit protocol that could display questions as they get fed into the system. The question fades after a few seconds, and at the end of the talk, when there's a QA session, the host can go through the questions sequentially. If there is no QA session, the questions could be automatically stored to the wiki relating to that talk.