I am sitting now in the beautiful city of Tampere, the heart of the Finnish lake district. This city offered to host GUADEC but were refused, nuts, but if you read my recent post Exploring Technical Conference Demand and Supply, you will understand why.
In 2007, I went to GUADEC, the GNOME User and Developer European Conference hosted in Birmingham, it was an absolutely fabulous conference. It had the leading GNOME developers, great talks, great venue, great entertainment. The organisation was so good in fact that we completely copied much of the organisation for two other conferences that I have been involved in.
There was however one massive flaw, although the whole thing went over seven days, the main conference talks were in the week. There were a few hundred developers who had flown in from Europe, the USA, Latin America and so on. Apart from me there were three other people from Birmingham in attendance (if I don't include the nearby city of Wolverhampton then it was 1). They might have well held GUADEC on the moon.
Simply speaking, there were no users. This was a massive lost opportunity. They could have had the main talks over a weekend, dozens or hundreds of local people could have attended and learned more about GNOME, and the seeds of future developers could have been sown. How many potential new GNOME hackers live in Birmingham, Britain's second biggest city? A lot more than 4.
For GUADEC 2009, they had the choice of whether to have GUADEC in Tampere, Finland or Coruña, Gran Canaria. So the developers, no doubt on expense accounts, chose Gran Canaria. I would vote for a week in the sun too. However, how many potential new GNOME hackers live in Tampere, Finland's second biggest city, home to two universities and a host of IT companies? How many potential new GNOME developers live in the tourist destination Coruña, population 13,575?
To fly from England to Tampere, costs £40 on Ryanair from Stansted Airport. The cheapest I can find to fly from England to Gran Canaria in July 2009, the height of the tourist season, costs £230 if I book today, which I cannot because the GUADEC organisers have not announced the date. It will cost £300-400 if I book after new year.
If the GNOME conference is a corporate expenses fueled jolly for full-time developers, then please be honest about it. Don't call it a user conference or a community conference, it is not. GUADEC should be called GDEC or GNOME Developer Summit or similar. Someone else can then set up a community conference aimed at everyone.
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