Concom Meeting Tomorrow In Ypsilanti

Matt Arnold

March 22, 2008

Tomorrow, Saturday March 21, there is a Penguicon Concom meeting at the home of Andy Vinton in Ypsilanti.

treebones

will provide fresh-baked bread, spinach quiche, fresh chocolate chip cookies, and some random salty foods available at 2 p.m. There'll be coffee, but not a whole lot of soda unless you want to bring some. The meeting will start at 3 PM. Email my gmail account, matt dot mattarn, for directions. I look forward to seeing you there!

Comments

drew4096 on Mar. 23, 2008 10:45 PM

I would have liked to goto this meeting, but the first that I have seen of this item was *this* morning, despite
the fact that I distinctly remember checking this blog a few times between then and its datestamp, including last
night at the Panera just as they were closing; at all times I only saw the posts up to your ceiling damage item.

Most likely it's a glitch with Livejournal. Still, in the future, it might be a better idea to post notices
like this in the Penguicon blog - as well as in this one, in the hope of increasing the chance that it will show
up *somewhere*. And a bit more than 14 hours notice might also help.

matt-arnold on Mar. 23, 2008 10:56 PM

I dropped the ball on this one. I'm sorry.

drew4096 on Mar. 23, 2008 11:12 PM

Accepted. But I'm still wondering how this managed to appear with a datestamp of late Friday night,
while being missed when I checked it several times on Saturday. It could be my browser - just now
the responses were still absent until I hit refresh. But the browser on my handheld also missed
this item.

Anonymous on Mar. 23, 2008 11:17 PM — Livejournal datestamps

On further examination I notice that the datestamps of all the responses to this item
have a (UTC) tag, but the datestamp of the original entry has no such tag. What time *did*
you post it?

matt-arnold on Mar. 23, 2008 11:42 PM — Re: Livejournal datestamps

I don't remember, but I think it was around midnight.

olivia-sutton on Apr. 21, 2008 1:07 AM — Penguin Con

Hi--

Just got back from PenguinCon. I must say I DID enjoy it, and I did get to SOME panels that I found useful. However, there's some sorta' negative feedback too (and just some general suggestions for next year). And, of course, I pop over to the actual PenguinCon website at some point and give them some official feedback too, just not tonight 'cause I'm exhausted after getting less sleep that usual and the 3 and a half drive back across the state.
GOOD POINTS: There were a couple of very good presenters (I don't have my book handy, so again it will be a bit before I send anything official to the con) - the British guy who talked on the "Year of the Desktop", was brilliant, very very funny, and did a excellent job making his points. I liked him. Two of the author guests I thought were good panelists (I think Matt Keaton and William Jones), interesting to listen to, somewhat amusing, both were on the space opera panel "...space monkeys", and the literacy panel. Unfortunately, one of the OTHER panelists on that panel (the woman in the middle, possibly Tamara Pierce?) was AWFUL - she was rude, she didn't know her sources, she argued with the audience, she INSULTED the audience, I honestly hope you never have her at your con again. Also, rather than handling an equally rude audience member (hey, it's an SF con, sometimes you need to "handle" the audience), she kept PROVOKING him, until someone ELSE in the audience basically told both of them to shut-up. This was disruptive to the entire panel.
Good points for professional development -- must of the Linux panels that I got to were really good. I did feel, tho', as sorta' a newcomer to Linux, someone trying to learn it, some panels were either over my head OR the panelists weren't quite willing to answer questions. (Now, at the UNIX command line panel, this DID NOT happen -- the presenter was great, there was a lot of good discussion; the only bad thing was the incredibly rude woman who kept yelling at everyone to shut up! Apparently, she did not know what a discussion was!)
MY SUGGESTION -- Please, please, please, have a Beginning/Intermediate/Advanced panel structure for the Linux and computing panels. Yes, I know this means triple the panels and work, but I think it will make things easier for your membership. (Hey, even the Food Network uses the B/I/A structure!)
Second, please re-work your scheduling in terms of crossing tracks -- I frequently had 2-4 panels I really wanted to go to: one in filk (missed them all), one in media, one in Linux, and one with the pro authors. Could you like rotate stuff? And do all the filking at night? Thanks!
Gotta run.
Overall, I liked the con and I'll go again.
--Olivia

matt-arnold on Apr. 21, 2008 10:45 PM — Re: Penguin Con

Olivia,

thanks, that's really informative. The weird thing about that bad panelist in the Space Monkeys panel is that she isn't listed in our schedule, no matter which source I go to. So I have no idea who she is.

One of our needs is for more panel moderators. It seems that discussion could have used one. "Beginner Baptism On The Command Line" was another that needed one, but it never occurred to us that a solo talk would need a moderator. I was there, and I have to disagree with you on this one. Audience members should not interrupt a speaker during a solo talk until the Q&A section. Discussion got in the way, and ruined the talk for me. I see where you're coming from, because clearly an audience-participation event would be a format that you would enjoy. We should do that in the future for this topic, and state explicitly in the blurb that it is "audience participation". But this was not supposed to be a discussion, and could not achieve its stated purposes if it were.

I'd like him to do it again and provide a "shusher". Then we beginners can learn at a pace that the speaker sets for us without distractions. There will not be a peanut gallery of non-beginners impressing each other, getting ahead of the presentation, making obscure tangential comments that make no sense to the un-initiated, and arguing over things that are irrelevant except to the truly CLI-passionate. A discussion is something they could do after it's over and the beginners-- who have no reason to care about any of that-- have left.

On Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced: We've tried for years, and gave up on it before each con because no one could determine in advance whether a talk would be Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced without listening to it.

On wanting to be more than one place at once: With this many events, we have an event going on in each room in order to fit them all in. With that many events happening at once (usually about nine or so), it's inevitable that most people will want to attend more than one. Last year when I was head of programming, I put the events on a spreadsheet that is color-coded to check that panels on the same area of interest would overlap as seldom as possible. But on the whole it's impossible to avoid due to sheer abundance. For years we have embraced and celebrated this surplus of riches. It's better than the alternative.

Thanks for the great comments, Olivia!