Back from FOSDEM

Back from FOSDEM

[Bastien]

Hi all,

we have had a good time at FOSDEM.  It was great to meet Carsten, Stefan
Vollmar, Sebastien Vauban, Jose E. Marchesi, Brian Gough and others.

Special thanks to Stefan, who presented a very nice use cas at his lab,
and to Sébastien who presented a few Org Babel examples.  Org cannot be
presented without Org Babel.

The devroom was fully packed, which is about 100 people.  I expected to
"introduce" Org and to try to convert some people, but about 70% of the
audience was already using Org!  So the presentation was really a mix of
generalities and a live demo of some features (to be honest: I was a bit
stressful and tired, I wish I did a better job.)

Note for later: when talking to hackers, forget about the slides and
have direct fun with an Org-mode buffer, display the *magic* of with no
taboo -- questions will come along as you hit some neat feature.

I've put my slides here:

  http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/u/org-fosdem-presentation-beamer.pdf

One point I made : what's special about Org is that it's a reflexive
tool, one that lets you discover the way you work and the way you want
to work.  Forget about getting "disciplined" by some external digital
secretary, start by having fun discovering yourself with a tool that 
has virtually no learning curve (or "just" that of Emacs itself...) 

One surprising discovery: we never had and we don't have a roadmap.  
I'm fine with this and I don't plan to set up one.  Better to do things
rather than planning to do them.

Best,

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Back from FOSDEM

[Andrea Crotti]

Bastien <bastien.guerry@wikimedia.fr> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> we have had a good time at FOSDEM.  It was great to meet Carsten, Stefan
> Vollmar, Sebastien Vauban, Jose E. Marchesi, Brian Gough and others.
>
> Special thanks to Stefan, who presented a very nice use cas at his lab,
> and to Sébastien who presented a few Org Babel examples.  Org cannot be
> presented without Org Babel.
>
> The devroom was fully packed, which is about 100 people.  I expected to
> "introduce" Org and to try to convert some people, but about 70% of the
> audience was already using Org!  So the presentation was really a mix of
> generalities and a live demo of some features (to be honest: I was a bit
> stressful and tired, I wish I did a better job.)

I was there and you all did a great job, thanks!

The only things that could be made better imho is the readability.
The font was too small for all three presenters, and the minibuffer
unreadable already from the middle of the room.

Also something to popup the keys (is there anything like growl for
linux) would be very useful in this kind of presentation

>
> Note for later: when talking to hackers, forget about the slides and
> have direct fun with an Org-mode buffer, display the *magic* of with no
> taboo -- questions will come along as you hit some neat feature.

Not totally sure, some slides for giving the same background to everyone
are always useful, and they increase the hype and curiousity to see the
tool in practice.

I think that in general hackers always don't stand very well magic, they
would always like to know what key was pressed, what command given and
so on to do them by themselves.

>
> I've put my slides here:
>
>   http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/u/org-fosdem-presentation-beamer.pdf
>
> One point I made : what's special about Org is that it's a reflexive
> tool, one that lets you discover the way you work and the way you want
> to work.  Forget about getting "disciplined" by some external digital
> secretary, start by having fun discovering yourself with a tool that 
> has virtually no learning curve (or "just" that of Emacs itself...) 
>

Yes that was a very nice point, might steal it in the future ;)

Re: Re: Back from FOSDEM

[Bastien]

Hi Andrea,

Andrea Crotti <andrea.crotti.0@gmail.com> writes:

> I was there and you all did a great job, thanks!

Thanks!

> The only things that could be made better imho is the readability.
> The font was too small for all three presenters, and the minibuffer
> unreadable already from the middle of the room.

Yes, I should have tested that before the conference.

> Also something to popup the keys (is there anything like growl for
> linux) would be very useful in this kind of presentation

I tested key-mon (https://code.google.com/p/key-mon/) which looks nice
at first glance, but modifiers keys are only displayed for a limited
time.  E.g. when you keep the control key pressed for C-c C-x C-c, it
will only display Control + c -- then x then c, which might be a bit
confusing.

I would love to hear about other tools for GNU/Linux.

>> Note for later: when talking to hackers, forget about the slides and
>> have direct fun with an Org-mode buffer, display the *magic* of with no
>> taboo -- questions will come along as you hit some neat feature.
>
> Not totally sure, some slides for giving the same background to everyone
> are always useful, and they increase the hype and curiousity to see the
> tool in practice.
>
> I think that in general hackers always don't stand very well magic, they
> would always like to know what key was pressed, what command given and
> so on to do them by themselves.

Fully agreed.

>> One point I made : what's special about Org is that it's a reflexive
>> tool, one that lets you discover the way you work and the way you want
>> to work.  Forget about getting "disciplined" by some external digital
>> secretary, start by having fun discovering yourself with a tool that 
>> has virtually no learning curve (or "just" that of Emacs itself...) 
>>
>
> Yes that was a very nice point, might steal it in the future ;)

Steal it! :)

Best,

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Re: Back from FOSDEM

[suvayu ali]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 7:13 AM, Bastien <bastien.guerry@wikimedia.fr> wrote:
>> Also something to popup the keys (is there anything like growl for
>> linux) would be very useful in this kind of presentation
>
> I tested key-mon (https://code.google.com/p/key-mon/) which looks nice
> at first glance, but modifiers keys are only displayed for a limited
> time.  E.g. when you keep the control key pressed for C-c C-x C-c, it
> will only display Control + c -- then x then c, which might be a bit
> confusing.
>
> I would love to hear about other tools for GNU/Linux.
>

Screenkey[1] might help. There is a very good demo[2] by a youtube user too.


[1] https://launchpad.net/screenkey
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8Wa2BR-9YU

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.