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Satisfaction: 2
Liked_Best: Meeting people and talking with them, learning and sharing experiences. I think this year\'s talks were not as good as the other two years.
Short_Talk: Like
Short_Talk_Length: 15
Short_Talk_Format: Vertical
Parallel: Just_Right
Format: 1+3
Later_Sessions: Yes
Exhibit_Hall_Hours: This year\'s arrangements worked well. I never found myself wanting to be in the exhibit hall when it was closed.
OS_Pavillion: No_Visit
Keynotes: No_change
Keynote_Speakers: Joel was a good warm up, but John and Eric\'s talk was too high on foil ware and Ward\'s likewise. Todd was fun to listen to. For 2007 invite Paul Graham for warm up, have one of the NASA guys give a keynote, and if you invited Borland tell them to drop the sales pitch
Improve_Next_Year: Have a keynote that includes the latest milestone release features like Erich and John used to do. Less foilware please that anyone can download from the web if they feel so inclined and more seeing people do demos. Likewise for the long talks, I lost count of the number of talks I walked out of because they were all foilware. Eclipse is also growing a lot and seems to be a latter day sourceforge in terms of the number of projects, some of which are bound to flop. I felt this year each project did their election pitch in a room with foils saying how great they are and who is involvled with them, etc... At JavaOne by contrast they pretty much insist you have about 1/3 of your talk as demos at least, and have code snippts and high technical content on your slides. Do likewise for EclipseCon 2007 and enforce it on the speakers by vetting their content up front.
For the short talks as well try to organize them by some forumla other than random, so if someone wants to see all the RCP/GUI stuff they can stay in the same room and not play musical chairs running between rooms to catch each interesting talk.
Have more fun after dark activities as well, we\'re all geeks at heart and love nothing more than a stupid treasure hunt or trivia quiz with a beer involved.
Overall 2006 was the worst of the 3 EclipseCons I\'ve been to, mainly because the quality of the speakers at the talks was poor, they didn\'t repeat questions to the audience when they were asked, they had too many foils and not enough deep technical content, etc...
Location: east