[Battlemesh] WBMv8 -- a personal perspective

[Simon Wunderlich]

Hi guys,

thanks a lot to everyone expressing their opinion!

Its a good thing to find out what has gone wrong - however I'd like to ask 
everyone to refrain from pointing with fingers who did what wrong/not 
enough/whatever. Nobody is perfect, and it seems we had a good share of 
communication problems at the event. Let's try to be proactive to find a better 
solution together - and let us discuss issues we didn't like about some people 
personally first, not on the mailing list (yes, e-mail/message/call the 
respective persons!). It seems some participants will also join the CCC camp, 
maybe this is a good place to discuss things too? :)

That said, thanks a lot to all of the testing team for their great effort! Its 
you guys who are the "battle" in battlemesh, and although there were some 
problems I think we had great experiences though. :)

Also thanks to all organizers and volunteers to make this a great event, I 
really enjoyed participating!!

I just want to add a few words on the Agenda issues:

On Sunday 09 August 2015 22:01:33 Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> [...]
> Suggested improvements
> ======================
> 
> No event is so perfect that it cannot be improved upon, and WBMv8 is no
> exception.
> 
> I thought many talks were too long -- everyone got a one hour slot, while
> many of the talks could have been done just as well in 30 minutes or so.
> (I originally asked for 40 minutes for my Babel talk, but got one hour
> anyway.)  I also thought there were many talks that were not clearly mesh
> related -- I think we should have a rule that says "if it's not mesh
> related, you get 15 minutes, and we'll interrupt you rudely if you go over
> your allotted time".  (And if you intend to sit down and scroll a text
> file rather than preparing a proper set of overhead slides and speaking to
> the audience, you get 0 minutes.  Sorry.)

My personal opinion is that we had quite long talks too, or rather too many 
tasks per day. Defaulting to 40 minutes slots instead of 60 minutes might be a 
good idea (or to offer 20/40/60 minute slots in general?).

Regarding topics, I believe that the times where 90% of the battlemesh 
participants were mesh protocol developers are over. Now we have many people 
from different facets of wireless community which introduce their topics, and 
as a protocol developer its great to get in touch with the other layers too.

If we have too many talk proposals, I'd also vote to prefer the mesh/tech 
talks over others, but if we have enough available slots, I don't think having 
these talks is a problem. We had a separate talk room, so everyone could join 
or leave as he/she wants.

Regarding the style and "proper slides", I'd also vote against requiring 
anything formal. I believe we should have everyone to use their slot as they 
want, whether they have a proper paper + slides, some textfile, or do a funny 
role playing game. :) Not everyone is used to give presentations, but as long 
speakers can make their point I prefer diversity over fixed requirements....

> 
> There were a small number of talks from commercial entities advertising
> their wares, which I think is great, but we should respect the right of
> other folks to avoid such talks.  Hence, they should be clearly described
> as marketing talks.  For example, one talk was described as "Talk about
> products from $COMPANY", where it should have said "This is a talk given
> by the marketing people from $COMPANY.  Full disclosure: $COMPANY has
> donated $NUMBER antennas and a small goat to WLAN-SI."

In case you refer to the Ligowave talk, I would assume that was pretty clear 
to everyone. We have their logo on the mainpage mentioned as sponsor for 
hardware and money (including a list of which hardware), we mentioned the 
sponsorship at the opening event, etc, and the talk was called "Ligowave", by 
"Ligowave", description "Talk about LigoDLB devices". Do you feel that was not 
clear enough, or do you mean another company?

Cheers,
     Simon
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