[GeekDinner-planning] talk list / content

[Jonathan Hitchcock]

Hi Joe,

Johann Botha wrote:
> I suspect (just a theory) that a big reason for the GeekDinners not getting
> above about 60 people showing up is because of the talk topics.

I'm not sure that this bit is true.  We've had fairly decent showings,
mostly getting the capacity that we stated on the wiki.  Summerville was
a bit lower than usual, but that's because it was quite far out of the way.

The talks aren't the drawcard for the dinners, they're just an excuse to
hold them - people come to the dinners to meet up and "network" and so on.


That said, I've always actually agreed with what you said about the
content of the talks - I feel that they "should" be as you describe. My
idea was that a talk should either be a non-technical view of a
technical subject (Ian Gilfillan talking about his experiences in
writing a MySQL book;  How a wifi network has helped the Scarborough
community), or a technical view of a non-technical subject (an idea for
a restaurant review website, for example).  This way, people can
approach them from either end, meet on a common ground, and take
something away from the talks.

The trouble is, we can't tell people that they can't talk.  In fact, we
don't want to.  People can come and talk about whatever they want - it's
all voluntary and participatory, and it's not up to us to try to force
it down a certain path.


What we can (and should) enforce is the format:  don't go above 5
minutes.  Nobody has time to be "boring" if they only have 5 minutes to
talk.  This way, we get a blast of thoughts from them, and then it's
over, and if they were interested enough to tell us about it, then it
was probably interesting enough to keep us entertained for five minutes.
 Any longer, and it's a talk that should be given at CLUG, and not at
GeekDinner.  If somebody does want to present their new programming
language, then we can suggest to them that they would only be able to do
it justice at length, at a CLUG meeting.

Those "talks wanted" (quality assurance, etc) are a bit out-dated now
anyway - they are carry-overs from the March GeekDinner, and should be
removed, probably...