Hi, Martin Wolters wrote: I'll give a few comments about that here: When a couple of us met at this year's LinuxTag (also here in Karlsruhe) in June, we found that though the exhibition lasted for 4 days, we had very little time in the end to discuss our projects/problems/ideas. Most of the time was just filled with demonstrating programs and explaining concepts to visitors of the booth. After the fair had ended, most of us had to drive home that same day in the afternoon, and so we (or at least I :-) felt like there was not enough time for our own concerns. This is something that could be tackled with a "programmer's meeting" where we can sit together in a room for 2-3 days, "bring our own gear", do hacking, talking, demoing to ourselves, and also preparing for the NEXT LinuxTag, again in Karlsruhe in June 2003. I have organized similar meetings (but with a different scope - then for Linux/m68k development) a couple of years ago, and the participants (usually 15-20 persons) to these meetings often were very happy about the rapid results of direct face-to-face communication (as opposed to E-Mail or phone). This is the "non-public" part. The ZKM is sponsoring this planned meeting by giving us rooms, power (and probably also network connectivity), but of course they also want some "profit" out of this for themselves. We offer them to make this meeting partially open by giving presentations (and probably also demos) of our work. They can announce this, attract visitors, gain more public attention through that, and thus have their "profit". This is the idea, and the "public" part. Ok, several questions here - Who will attend? Hard to predict, this is the first time we're doing this. It will also depend on the PR work that the ZKM (and we) put into this. My hope would be that the audience is a mixture of audio-interested Linux people and Linux-interested audio folks :-). It's ok (from my point of view) that talks are somewhat technical, but it would probably also be good if they are entertaining to some degree. How long is a presentation? No "slot times" were defined yet; I'd expect similar durations as on Linux congress lectures: about 30 - 45 minutes for a presentation plus 15 minutes for questions and discussion. There might be good reasons to prolong a presentation if the topic is complex, but at some point people usually get a bit tired - no single presentation should (IMHO) last longer than 90 minutes in total. Language? If we have english-speaking presenters (and I hope we do ;-), it's clear what language to use. As for the german talkers, we could think about either asking the audience at the start of the presentation if any english-only folks are among them, and adapt, or rather hold the presentations in german. Personally, I don't care; others might have different opinions on this. Again, nothing has been decided here yet. I think that when the "show begins", a poster near the entrance should tell for each lecture when it begins, what speaker, what topic and what language it is held in. Available equipment? Still to early to say. We get 2 rooms and a larger lecture room. I hope that some kind of PA is installed in that lecture room, and getting a beamer should be possible, too. Apart from that, as most of us bring their own equipment, we should be able to improvise a lot if we do no get from the ZKM what we need. Presentations in parallel? I don't think so. We are not going to have that much presentations anyway (my guess right now is something between 3 and 6), and these could all be handled sequentially on one day. I like both ideas, and both would fit. The ZKM has (as far as I know) a 2MBit line, so I am not sure of the livestream-ability of this. Also, it's very hard right now to estimate how many folks who actually have Linux/ALSA/...-specific questions will show up there. After all, it's some kind of experiment for us (as well as for the ZKM), but I'm very interested in seeing how well this will work out. Hope that answers your questions somewhat, and thanks for the offer, Frank -- Frank Neumann (Frank.Neumann(a)st.com), VIONA Development Center STMicroelectronics, Karlstraße 27, 76133 Karlsruhe