MeeGo Conference 2010/Early Bird Events

Revision as of 14:43, 6 November 2010

Introduction

It would be nice to organize a weekend like the Barcelona Long Weekend we (the Maemo Community) organized on October 2009. These two days should be completly organized by the community and for the community. No formal conferences or talks, but interactive activities and hacking sessions where you, the participant, are the main actor.

What about the content of these two days? We could have (for example) programming tutorials, Qt tutorials, hacking sessions on a specific task, round tables where a developer explains his difficoulties implementing a feature and the others help him, ecc...

The first thing to do is spreading this and asking people (users, developers ecc...) what they would like to find during these two days. Once we've gathered some nice ideas we can organize them better.

List of people who would like to attend

Update: We have added a registration page for the Early Bird event. Please register on the conference website instead of adding your name below.

Please make sure to be registered to the MeeGo Conference. If you'd like to attend, please add your name here - no strings attached, just to get a rough overview of the number of people interested. If you are also interested in helping organizing the event, please also add your name at the bottom of this Wiki page in the Volunteers section.

• Andrea Grandi
• Thomas Perl
• Dave Neary
• Jens Wiik
• Randall Arnold (coming in Sunday, but can arrive Saturday if someone can share a room...?)
• Martin Grimme
• Daniele Maio
• Dawn Foster
• Sivan Greenberg
• Aniello Del Sorbo
• Gary Birkett
• Attila Csipa
• Fernando Martin
• Ronan Mac Laverty
• Quim Gil
• Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen
• Uwe Kaminski
• Jens Bocklage
• Tim Samoff
• Shane Marks
• paul mooney
• Ben Lau
• Alison Chaiken

When and Where

The basic idea is to organize these two days on November 13th, 14th. About the location that will host us we still have no idea. Probably it will be possible to use the same hotel used for the MeeGo Conference, but this must be confirmed yet.

Provisional program

All sessions are subject to confirmation or change. As we confirm workshop & tutorial leaders, we will add more details. Other session ideas proposed below may end up being included, based on popular demand.

Tutorials: 3 hour sessions with a trainer going over the basics and getting participants using tools. Participants should bring a laptop for development.

Workshops: hands-on, meet-the-experts sessions, where you can work in small groups brainstorming application design, getting help porting your application to MeeGo, or coding.

Geocache: will be outside the hotel. The meeting place and time will be announced closer to the event (probably as GPS co-ordinates ;)

The Maker's Contest: will be a team competition limited to 10 teams of up to 5 people. The contest subject matter will be announced closer to the contest. The ideal space requirements are basically a bar, someplace where interested spectators can look on, and 10 tables which participants can work on.

Saturday

Sunday

Tasks

• Spread this idea around the community (in Maemo and MeeGo mailing lists and forums)
• Gather ideas and feedback from users and developers
• Create a public poll so the people can vote the most interesting content and we'll have a more realistic idea of what users want
• Thinking about a proper name for these two days (sounds "Dublin MeeGo Weekend" good?)
• Maybe create a customized logo for "Dublin MeeGo Weekend" ?
• Implementation of a registration form for this event
• ecc...

Ideas for the program

Overall program structure:

• Active participation in the event - less talk, more code. No powerpoints - just you, the editor and the compiler. Be productive!
• A two-day Hackathon: Start putting your ideas into fresh code, or finish a project that has been on the back burner for some time
• Participants are encouraged to share their progress at the end of each day - what they accomplished, where they need further help, etc.

Session ideas:

• Gentle introduction to Qt through PySide and QML, exploring the object hierarchy through the improved interactive interpreter IPython (-sivan)
• A short but intensive indroduction to Qt/C++ (something like 3-4 hours course, offered by some expert developer)
• Round tables to discuss about UI improvements or features implementation: a developer could have found some difficoult implementing the UI for his application or to provide a particular feature. Other expert developers could try to help him with his problem.
• A workshop for x86 developers on getting started with MeeGo development for ARM - end goal: By the end of the session, everyone has a sample application running in an emulator on their laptop
• Developer tools training - a half day on using git, valgrind, oprofile
• One night coding competition.
• ...
• Workshop about libmeegotouch[1], table of contents, taught by ayanes & matusz. Due to we don't have enough time in the second day of the conference, maybe is a good idea to teach also the workshop on the weekend in a long session (~2 hours and 30 minutes).

Extra-curricular activities:

• A variety of team competitions with some small prizes
  • Geocache treasure hunt
  • Maker's contest - some ideas: build a good mousetrap powered car, a bridge with glue & lollipop sticks, or the best paper airplane (details to be announced on-site)
  • A quiz??

Dublin Weekend Program

(the program has still to be defined)

• As this is the first meeting between many Nokia and Intel developers maybe we should all go to the Pub on Saturday
• On Sunday a trip to Newgrange would be enjoyable and enlightening

Volunteers

• Andrea Grandi
• Thomas Perl
• Dave Neary
• Randall Arnold
• Sivan Greenberg
• Aniello Del Sorbo
• Attila Csipa
• Tim Samoff
• Shane Marks
• Michał Sawicz
• Ben Lau

Links and discussions

• MeeGo Forum thread
• talk.maemo.org thread