Rethinking WineConf

[jwhite]

Hi All,

This past Wine conference, while great fun as always, was not as well
attended as Wine conferences in the past.

So I would like to stir up trouble by suggesting we rethink WineConf.

For those that have not attended, the Wine conference has been a mostly
annual affair since 2002. It is open to all, but is advertised as being
aimed at Wine developers. About 35 people attend each year. It's been
in Minnesota about every 3rd year, and is otherwise 'normally' somewhere
in Europe.

I see the primary goal as creating human bonds between otherwise
anonymous people (aka going to the pub). It's a bonus if it also spurs
resolution to tricky issues, or motivates people to get more done.

So I'd like to ask folks to brain storm with me.

How could Wineconf be different? If you've never been, what would
encourage you to come?

If you've been to a technical conference recently that you thought was
well done, what did they do well? Anything we could emulate?

Any other ideas, or suggestions?

Cheers,

Jeremy

[perryh]

Jeremy White <[email protected]> wrote:

the Wine conference has been a mostly annual affair since 2002 ...
It's been in Minnesota about every 3rd year, and is otherwise
'normally' somewhere in Europe.

How could Wineconf be different? If you've never been, what would
encourage you to come?

One thing that would encourage me to come would be holding it in
Portland, Oregon. Even Seattle or San Francisco is too far away.

[dimesio]

If you really want users to come, I suggest you change the second sentence on http://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf. Right now it sends a very clear message that users are not the least bit welcome.

[jwhite]

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 6:07 am Post subject:
If you really want users to come, I suggest you change the second sentence on http://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf. Right now it sends a very clear message that users are not the least bit welcome.

/me winces. I wrote that text; and I never intended it to make anyone
feel unwelcome. The thinking when I wrote it was to give fair warning
that the topics would be primarily developer oriented.

I've amended that text.

So then let's imagine that users now feel welcome, and they come in
droves. Aside from going to the pub, what would make for a good conference?

Cheers,

Jeremy

[tparker]

On 1/10/2012 10:23 AM, Jeremy White wrote:

So then let's imagine that users now feel welcome, and they come in
droves. Aside from going to the pub, what would make for a good conference?

As far as meetings/presentations go, if users are welcome and it's
assumed that some who attend will be newbie users then it might be good
to have someone give a basic (understandable by non-programmers) outline
of how Wine works, why it works the way it does, limitations, and ways
non-programmer users can contribute to the project. I know some of this
is already readable online, but pages of text do not have the same
impact on all users as a short presentation and question session might.

Sometimes in other conferences I have noticed that having a few seasoned
users/devs sit in on newbie talks also helps to highlight areas that
those in the know do not realize are issues for new people or things
that have been overlooked for improvement because the people already
using them are comfortable with the work arounds and tricks.

[DanKegel]

What conferences do people already attend? Maybe we can piggyback on those.

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Alex Bradbury <[email protected]> wrote:

Another angle on this might be making some changes to WineConf, but
also making a concerted effort to make sure Wine is well represented
at events many developers and users already attend such as FOSDEM and
OSCON.

In that regard, let me say: this year I am coorganizing the
CrossDesktop DevRoom at FOSDEM and I am truly disappointed we have not
received a single talk proposal about Wine, even though I sent the
call for talks and a reminder to this list.

With my open source developer hat on, an introductory talk on Wine
development would be very appealing to me.

Also, a talk (or maybe more than one) for third-party ISVs which want
to make sure their applications work with Wine would also be nice.

At work we seriously considered Wine for a big product which uses
embedded virtualization that could probably be replaced with Wine, but
we didn't really have a clue where to get started or what we could
achieve in 1 year if we put a few people to hack on Wine. Expectations
were so unclear management was not in the mood to throw a few
thousands to hire CodeWeavers or any Wine hacker in Europe for a
preliminary study.

--
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)

[Shachar Shemesh]

On 01/09/2012 08:31 PM, Jeremy White wrote:

Hi All,


If you've been to a technical conference recently that you thought was
well done, what did they do well? Anything we could emulate?

I've gave you some of this feedback in person at WineConf in France.

First, as long as it is aimed at Wine hackers, that's who'll show up.
The stagnation in attendance is, therefor, more an indication of the
state of wine hackers than it is of the conference. What I'd suggest:

1. Split the days. First day aimed at hackers, second day at users. Have
a better defined schedule for that second day, so people would have an
idea what to expect.
2. For the hacker's day, I expected the "free form" to take on the form
of small working groups. For example, in France, I expected to have some
time where Aric and I could sit on a laptop together and actually hack
BiDi into a better working state. The conference didn't leave enough
room for such an activity.
3. Have the schedule and location ride another conference (similar to
the co-op we did with Samba in Germany). Either that, or schedule the
conference at a place that has a strong local LUG. The conference at
Germany had a great attendance, not only of Samba hackers, but also of
local Linux enthusiasts who took the opportunity to attend. Having a
non-Minnesota US conference might help, where there is an established
LUG that will be interested to tag along.

Any other ideas, or suggestions?

On a practical note, I suggested to help organize a conference in
Jerusalem. I had a specific location in mind, which is extremely close
(easy walking distances) to the pubs and restaurants of the center of
the city, and it's a combination of hotel and youth hostel, so prices
can be expected to be cheap(er, at least in off-season). Israel at
large, and Jerusalem in particular, have established LUGs that will
probably contribute a lot of fresh eyeballs. Let me know if you want me
to find out more.

Shachar

--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com

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[Adys]

Users coming to Wineconf will likely want to hear about Wine's development;
what improvements they can expect, the progress on their favourite apps,
etc.
I suspect a great deal of users will also want to share their ideas on what
they feel is important in further developments.

J. Leclanche


On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 3:23 PM, Jeremy White <[email protected]>wrote:

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 6:07 am Post subject:
If you really want users to come, I suggest you change the second

sentence on http://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf. Right now it sends a very
clear message that users are not the least bit welcome.

/me winces. I wrote that text; and I never intended it to make anyone
feel unwelcome. The thinking when I wrote it was to give fair warning
that the topics would be primarily developer oriented.

I've amended that text.

So then let's imagine that users now feel welcome, and they come in
droves. Aside from going to the pub, what would make for a good
conference?

Cheers,

Jeremy

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[asb]

On 9 January 2012 18:31, Jeremy White <[email protected]> wrote:

So I'd like to ask folks to brain storm with me.

How could Wineconf be different?  If you've never been, what would
encourage you to come?

Another angle on this might be making some changes to WineConf, but
also making a concerted effort to make sure Wine is well represented
at events many developers and users already attend such as FOSDEM and
OSCON.

Alex

[msmeissn]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 12:31:11PM -0600, Jeremy White wrote:

Hi All,

This past Wine conference, while great fun as always, was not as well
attended as Wine conferences in the past.

So I would like to stir up trouble by suggesting we rethink WineConf.

For those that have not attended, the Wine conference has been a mostly
annual affair since 2002. It is open to all, but is advertised as being
aimed at Wine developers. About 35 people attend each year. It's been
in Minnesota about every 3rd year, and is otherwise 'normally' somewhere
in Europe.

I see the primary goal as creating human bonds between otherwise
anonymous people (aka going to the pub). It's a bonus if it also spurs
resolution to tricky issues, or motivates people to get more done.

So I'd like to ask folks to brain storm with me.

How could Wineconf be different? If you've never been, what would
encourage you to come?

If you've been to a technical conference recently that you thought was
well done, what did they do well? Anything we could emulate?

Any other ideas, or suggestions?

- Users ... as this was brought up

Reality check: Wine users will not travel 100s of kms to a standalone conference.

This would make sense only if we attach wineconf to another general conference


- Attaching to other conferences?

We do not really share much with other projects (please do not bring up Samba: we don't),
but perhaps attaching to general conferences...


General conferences like FOSDEM (where other projects run Developer Rooms)...
or LinuxCon with their specific tracks.
This might be workable... but I do not think it will bring more people.

- Changing the style...

A talk / discussion only wineconf is not really flying anymore... we don't have that much
talks.

The workshop elements we introduced in the last years are however more the direction to go.
So something of a workshop is my best bet at keeping interest.


Question is whether we can find workshop style things besides "fixing the testsuite" that attract
all developers? I think that will be hard.


- Perhaps a shrinking audience is unavoidable.

This is a bit of a fact that some projects I have been in found hard to cope with... That after
the interest peak it might go down.

Ciao, Marcus

[tijnema]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:00 PM, Marcus Meissner <[email protected]> wrote:

 The workshop elements we introduced in the last years are however more the direction to go.
 So something of a workshop is my best bet at keeping interest.


 Question is whether we can find workshop style things besides "fixing the testsuite" that attract
 all developers? I think that will be hard.

I think that a workshop 'How to start coding for wine' workshop would
do good. That might attract programmers that really want to help out,
but as you probably all know, the learning curve for wine is pretty
steep.

Matijn

[DanKegel]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 8:34 PM, Damjan Jovanovic <[email protected]> wrote:

What about Mono? .NET applications that use P/Invoke won't ever work outside
Windows without Wine, so they kind of need us, and many native applications
now also use .NET, so we kind of need them. Unlike with Samba, the licenses
are compatible, and a combined/attached conference might attract some of
their developers to help us out.

From what I recall, the Mono people don't really intend
to support those apps; they're more into supporting people
who are writing new apps from scratch.
- Dan

[Damjan Jovanovic]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 12:00 AM, Marcus Meissner <[email protected]>wrote:

- Attaching to other conferences?

We do not really share much with other projects (please do not bring up
Samba: we don't),

What about Mono? .NET applications that use P/Invoke won't ever work
outside Windows without Wine, so they kind of need us, and many native
applications now also use .NET, so we kind of need them. Unlike with Samba,
the licenses are compatible, and a combined/attached conference might
attract some of their developers to help us out.
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[Jakob Eriksson]

On January 10, 2012 at 11:00 PM Marcus Meissner <[email protected]> wrote:

- Perhaps a shrinking audience is unavoidable.

   This is a bit of a fact that some projects I have been in found hard to
cope with... That after
   the interest peak it might go down.
 

 
And if you are looking for a reason, one is that interest in the Windows
platform itself is waning.
Maybe if Wine picked up the Metro glove, interest in Wine as a whole could be
rekindled.
 
//Jakob
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[dimesio]

So then let's imagine that users now feel welcome, and they come in
droves. Aside from going to the pub, what would make for a good conference?

One thing I think you need to do to get more new people to come is to publish a clearer agenda beforehand. Saying "we'll figure it out as we go along" may be enough for the regular attendees, but I wouldn't expect many new people, users or developers, to spend the time and money based on that vague description.

I don't think ordinary users are likely to attend unless the conference happens to be in their hometown, but some of the regular non-developer volunteers might. I, for one, would be very interested in is a session for AppDB admins and maintainers.

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am Dienstag, 10. Januar 2012, 23:00:38 schrieb Marcus Meissner:

- Users ... as this was brought up

Reality check: Wine users will not travel 100s of kms to a standalone
conference.

This would make sense only if we attach wineconf to another general
conference

An unconventional thought crossed my mind: Attach it to one of those gigantic
Lan parties like the DreamHack. A big number of private users are gamers, this
might catch some of them.

Of course we can't simultanously attach it to a Lan party and a classic
conference, but we can variate things over the years.

[lahmbi5678]

Just adding another point of view: The number of wine devs isn't growing much, because it is a very challenging project. Allmost all the simple things are implemented. From the perspective of users and programmers, wine can be frustrating, because sometimes you have to wait for years, until a feature like USB support will eventually be implemented. There may be 10000s of Win32 API experts out there in various countries ignoring DMCA, but they may have demanding daytime jobs and may prefer reverse engineering. All this means that wine urgently needed professionalization, incorporated by Codeweavers. Wine isn't a hobby project anymore. The 'simplest' way to enlarge the number of wine devs nowadays seems to be Codeweavers hiring more people.

So far this may sound a bit too negative, on the other hand I'd propose something like that:
Offer a workshop for users with programming skills, every participant may choose one application he/she wants to get running and/or bugfree, the goal of the workshop should be to demonstrate how to debug issues and solve or at least work around issues. I don't know how much time would be required for such a workshop, maybe 2-5 days, and probably one professional wine dev per participant (economic issue?). And again, some issues like copy protection, USB, etc may not be resolvable in short time, so there should be some kind of preceding discussion.

[gurketsky]

Am 11.01.2012 16:23, schrieb Stefan Dösinger:

Am Dienstag, 10. Januar 2012, 23:00:38 schrieb Marcus Meissner:

- Users ... as this was brought up

Reality check: Wine users will not travel 100s of kms to a standalone
conference.

This would make sense only if we attach wineconf to another general
conference

An unconventional thought crossed my mind: Attach it to one of those gigantic
Lan parties like the DreamHack. A big number of private users are gamers, this
might catch some of them.

Of course we can't simultanously attach it to a Lan party and a classic
conference, but we can variate things over the years.

We used wine to get COD2 running on Vista with wined3d and an intel chip
on a private LAN party. It worked, but I couldn't comment on the
rendering quality anymore. Well the game is old and I think a normal
windows user would never try something like this. So using wine at LAN
parties might be a good idea to get more attention and to arrive new users.

[Stefan Leichter]

Hello,

most of the answers i read so far were about the "content" of wineconf. Here are two different ideas:

1. when i looked around a wineconf i noticed that wineconf 2012 is not fixed jet. I know lots of companies here in Germany who ask their employee to announce the plans for the holidays within the first two month of the year or even earlier. How is this handled in the rest of the world? This might become a problem for developers their job is not working on wine. Wineconf may be within their holidays or shortly after. They may need to take some days of for travel and can not, ...

2. Think about the time of the year. Last year wineconf was earlier as the two year before. <joke> It was during Octoberfest in Munich. Where do you like to got better? </joke>. What about conflict with courses/exams at university.

Or just ask (in private mails?) the members of wineconf 2010, who stayed away in 2011 what may need to change for 2012 to see them again. What about GSOC workers, have they all been at wineconf? These are the next generation wine developer.

Regards
Stefan

[DanKegel]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Steven Edwards <[email protected]> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

From what I recall, the Mono people don't really intend
to support those apps; they're more into supporting people
who are writing new apps from scratch.

There needs to be some mechanism to provide for the legacy user, even if
they don't want to pick up the ball and run with it.

Well, sure. I was replying to a suggestion that we tack
wineconf onto the side of, say, http://monospace.us/
by saying that I didn't think they'd be interested.
Do you think they would be?

[jwhite]

Thank you for all the replies. Here is what I've taken away so far:

1. Our intro text was overtly hostile to users. I've removed that.

2. Potential attendees want a clear agenda.

3. Coordinating with another event remains interesting.


So, exploring #3 a bit further - what if we asked for our own track
within FOSDEM 2013? (I presume that would be February 2013 in Brussels)
It would let us all get together, allow us to have a few sessions
targeted at non Wine developers, and could also save us some hassle.
And I like Belgian beer.

Would we lose some of the joy of having our very own conference?

We could try it once and go back to the old format if it doesn't work out.

Of course, given our (so far) non participation in FOSDEM 2012, we may
not be welcome... :-/

Cheers,

Jeremy

[DanKegel]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Jeremy White <[email protected]> wrote:

So, exploring #3 a bit further - what if we asked for our own track
within FOSDEM 2013?  (I presume that would be February 2013 in Brussels)
 It would let us all get together, allow us to have a few sessions
targeted at non Wine developers, and could also save us some hassle.
And I like Belgian beer.

FOSDEM was the only conference mentioned by more than one person in my
little survey

I see Fosdem 2012 has a mono room:
http://weblog.savanne.be/470-mono-devel ... m-2012-cfp
I wonder if that would be a model to, um, emulate.
- Dan

[Steven Edwards]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

From what I recall, the Mono people don't really intend
to support those apps; they're more into supporting people
who are writing new apps from scratch.

There needs to be some mechanism to provide for the legacy user, even if
they don't want to pick up the ball and run with it.

--
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is
an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
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[Jakob Eriksson]

On January 17, 2012 at 8:49 PM Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

Well, sure.  I was replying to a suggestion that we tack
wineconf onto the side of, say, http://monospace.us/
by saying that I didn't think they'd be interested.
Do you think they would be?

 
Well, if they would, it would be the greatest
thing since sliced bread IMHO.  Someone please ask.

best regards,
Jakob