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These are the notes from an "impromptu" BOF session at UBS-MTV

09 Nov 2006 - The Honourable Lord Bacon and Lady Silber presding.

Topic: Planning, Preperation, and Execution of an Ubuntu Users Conference

• There appears to be great interest in holding a Ubuntu Users Conference
• Two types of events could be constructed
  • Big conference
  • Smaller "barcamp" style events
• Whatever we do should be scalable so that we can send people to these but not tie them up so they can't do any programming/leadership

• We've done something like this before with Love Day

• Related are Ubuntu at conferences spec and Future Conference Planning, Ubucon

• Conferences, especially LoCo driven, are great recruiting events.

• We don't want to have the same people at the same conferences over and over because it becomes rather boring.
• We want to standardize and include branding
• We'd prefer to have something live and energizing for a short period of time rather than a long drawn out event.
• The tone should permit families to participate without being stuffy
• Team of Staff with bright t-shirts who can act as information sources/greeters/helpers to all of the visitors.
• We should probably define a proper schedule with a process around it

• We should have a small team of people with community representation to setup UbuCon (or whatever we call this)

  • The team needs to be somewhat restricted to ensure consistency and have demonstrated trustworthiness and leadership capabilities
    • Jane says the people should NOT be restricted, but the leadership could be vetted. It's not within our culture to restrict participation.
• Jorge mentioned that we need to set a policy/process of how to deal with poisonous people. He gave an example from the Ohio fest which there was a big problem.
• Jono suggests we define a set of leaders to organize the event
• We agree that for the user conference there shouldn't be a registration fee (ie it should be free)
• Canonical is thinking through a profession conference with registration fee designed for businesses. It will probably be in Aug of 2007 in the US.
• We discussed having exhibitors (e.g. 40 spaces, first come first serve). They would need to be close to the people. It would cause problems with the venue because we wouldn't be able to hold it at someplace like Google.
  • perhaps we shouldn't have vendors
  • perhaps we should allow non-sales/marketing oriented items
• It would be nice to mixup the schedule so we have "Rockstarts" mingled with "Lighting"
  • It would helpful to have BOFs which are of sufficient interest that it would draw some of the developers
• Mark brought up that holding this after a UDS then people who attended the UDS would have an idea of what would be in the next release.

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