On 04/10/2014 08:50, Ted Hardie wrote:
On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 11:14 AM, John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com>
wrote:
I wonder if we can't do something between "finalize down to the minute"
and get blocks of time that aren't a week long. In apps, for example, do
"web stuff" in one block and "email stuff" in another.
I fear that would make the heads explode of the people who are trying
to schedule stuff. If you put all the email sessions in a small
number of blocks, it'd be hard to avoid scheduling sessions at the
same time that are of interest to the same people. One of the reasons
to spread them out across the week is so we can have something
analogous to tracks, so people interested in apps stuff can go to all
the apps sessions and so forth.
We might want to make the bar for scheduling sessions somewhat higher,
with the goal to shrink the meetings from five days back to four.
That would save money for everyone.
I think we're thinking of different sized blocks. I meant "Monday is for
mailing and messaging"; "Wednesday's for the web" sized blocks, not putting
them all in parallel sessions in the same time slots. I agree with you,
that would not make sense.
It's still a viciously hard scheduling problem, especially for areas
without the clear-cut divisions of APPS or OPS-NM, but it might help a bit.
I have to whack this mole again:
We *want* people to stay the whole week and participate in meetings
outside their own speciality, so as to detect overlaps, oversights and
synergies. We *don't* want people to keep their heads down and focus
only on one topic. That way lie silos and duplications of effort.
Just to take your example, if Monday is mail and Wednesday is web,
when is Internationalization and when is Security? (And to be
really silly, when is Webmail?)
It doesn't compute.
Brian