FOSS4G'13

Pamela has some good points, thanks for sharing this Jo.

But I think part of the challenge with FOSS4G is that much of the core techie audience does NOT want a "newbie friendly" event. They want to talk to other serious geeks and are fairly intolerant of non-geeks. That's a generalized statement of course but I think it's broadly true. I had comments at Denver like "we don't need presentations on why open source is a viable option - people who paid to attend this conference are past that stage" - which of course isn't true for newbies. So it's a tricky balance - I think we need to attract newbies, but we need to do it in a way that doesn't detract from the "hard core techie" experience that many of the heavyweight developers expect. I think that clearly separated tracks and/or a separate newbies event are obvious ways to try to do this. But things like plenary sessions to appeal to both groups can be difficult.