[Chennaipy] Talks for the next meetup

[Shrayas rajagopal]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 10:36 PM, Vijay Kumar <vijaykumar at bravegnu.org> wrote:

> The primary goal of a meetup is for like minded people to come
> together, share their knowledge and experiences. That, speaking at a
> meetup helps you to talk at a conference is a useful side effect.

A nice side effect, if you may. Win Win TBH.

> We need to strike a balance between making a meetup, speaker centric
> and audience centric. What you are suggesting makes things more
> speaker centric.

Not sure I quite agree with this, I think it is helping both ways, A
good talk is enjoyed by both the speaker and by the audience. A tilt
towards being speaker centric bleeds into being audience centric.

> I am not saying it cannot be made interesting. You need to be an
> expert speaker to do that. And we want to accommodate speakers with
> different skill levels.

+1 about accommodating people with different skill levels. Thats why
suggesting that we have one full length talk and others as lighting
talks. No one is being forced into giving a full length talk. The
choice still exists to go with giving a lighting talk.

> And that works for a lightning talk. Not everybody would want to sit
> through a 45 min talk on scientific computing with Python. I know it,
> because I have seen it happen at meetups.

Agreed. I also think there might be a case where people can get
saturated with lighting talks. They might *want* deep dive sessions.
Full length talks are a good place for deep dives. Having more than 10
minutes allows one to take up more in depth topics and talk about
internals of something.

Also, why don't we let that be a choice. @Gaurav's idea of having a
slack meeting a week after a meetup to decide on the next full length
talk seems like a really nice idea to do that. We can't please
everyone, right? 80% is good enough.

> As a meetup organizer, my role is to get a great audience for the
> speakers, and to get great talks for the audience. And I want to do it
> without ever saying no to a single speaker. I just can't see that
> happening with "full" length talks.

Having *all* full length talks would cause this problem, agreed.
Having one, I quite honestly don't think so.