LWE Utrecht
Harald Welte is right about the LWE people knowing how to run a Trade show but not a conference.
Comon, a conference with what.. 8 talks ? Did they even want a conference ? And if they wanted one I`m wondering what their target audience was and what kind of speakers/topics would interrest visitors of such a tradeshow. Xen was a big hit for sure .. with lots of people standing in the back and sitting on the floor in the front listening to both our talks. If the audience of a InfoSecurity, StorageExpo and LinuxWorld mainly consist of IT Managers and people involved in buying infrastructure, what kind of talks should you schedule ?
I`m sure there were some Linuxgeeks around the floor interrested in the talks.. but what was the general audience ?
Did they really care about , GPLViloations, the internals of Xen , or how to autodeploy it in a large scale environment ? I really hope so.. but I fear that such local tradeshows don't attract the audience for such topic. Sure some individual visitors will have learned a lot from the talks, but my guess is the bigger part of the audience didn't bother seeing the talks, they just went there to get the freebies, see the hostesses and have a reason not to be in the office for a day, no really the number of Novell bags you saw downtown Utrecht in the afternoon ... explains a lot :)
So for the next edition, maybe a brainstorm on who you want to see in your talks, what do you want to tell the people. Do you want to attrack corporate people or FLOSS enthousiasts. I`m used to give talks to both audiences, but I really wasn't sure what to expect.
But anyway .. thnx for the Manual Power thingie , I hope it really works for my wrists ;)