I suggest having the conference in Austin, Texas. Europe is already sold on LoRa. USA is just beginning. Those ideas that will come out of the conference will help LoRa spread in the USA.
I’ve seen community events embedded into larger hacker conventions which worked quite well because people are already there - so there is no extra travel.
As the epicenter is in the Netherlands right now it seems logical to have it there or pretty close just to reduce total travel effort
We were thinking about if we could do a distributed conference. So with each local community doing their own. Would be awesome right. Having a global conference. Exchanging content around the world.
What about the unconference concept. Last week I was at such an event. It works like this.
Everybody is free to prepare a piece, a talk, a demo a story. At the start of just a week before the conference. These are submitted. We pick an event place where we have a lot of small to medium rooms. The talks are than presented to the audience and they can join them. Then the most popular are scheduled in the different meeting rooms. And maybe the not so popular are moved to round tables.
Unconference / Barcamp are formats which seem to fit quite well.
For people which are unfamiliar with those concepts and for a community yet to emerge, it is helpful to set (and perhaps vote upon) some topics / talks / workshops beforehand. So people have an idea what to expect.
I guess the tricky question is how many people will attend to find the right venue.
Or just make a wild guess and limit places (and move if needed).
I like the unconference concept. Most technical conferences I went to use some form of this concept.
Meeting rooms at the venue are converted into small to medium sized presentation rooms and a larger area is most of the times set up as a technical fair with a mix of companies and research organizations showing their work.
This way visitors can not only select between the different presentations but they also get some time to visit the fair and see what people are working on or what companies are selling.
And (dang! this is gonna cost my Boss money ) if you charge the companies for presenting at the fair it keeps the costs for visitors down.
Sounds cool. If you’re thinking about a global event perhaps communities that just started can be inspired by more established communities. Perhaps with that unconference concept cherry picking between accessible subjects could be interesting starting point for those new communities. In that case this should be taken into account when scheduling the sub meetings.
Use cases seem very important at the moment. I think in order to get a more diverse community it’s important to less and even non technical people thrilled. Their help can be very important and I notice it’s currently hard to explain what’s exactly the use of building a network. One of the reasons that this is important is that it could also raise interest among schools or universities to build gateways. Even local governments supporting educational projects may get inspired. And the reason that this is so important is that it makes it much more accessible to start with the subject if you only have to care about a node instead of both node and gateway.
Like the idae of a (un)conference in whatever form. Tracks suggestions looks good to me. I would suggest two things. Use cases ideally demoed with real functional things or with an attractive movie. And secondly: let’s have partners/vendors joined (and possibly sponsored). The best showcase would be IMHO presenting real life solutions and an ecosystem of techies, makers, deamers, business folks and commercial parties ceating business value with LoRa technology. Personally I could invite IBM NL, Anybridge and some others.
That would be great. I could also check if I can get my Boss to sign up. But first of all TTN has to decide what the conference will look like and where it will be.
“This fall” is only 3-4 month away. We need some time to get any commercial parties interested and it will take some more time for them to decide what to do. Also, @wienke needs to get a good venue band that also takes time.
For location; Groningen would have perfect locations for this where people are allready busy with TTN (the people who got provence wide TTN coverage)…
Hi, I love the idea of an “unconference” that also has conferences around the world, as “opposite” as that seems.
Wienke, please post further details as they emerge. I may know a large company that would be interested in sponsoring a conference in Toronto, Canada or somewhere along the NorthEast of USA.
Feedback: I also love having use-cases as a focus of the conferences.
Speaking as one of those kickstarter pre-order people, waiting for my gateway and two Arduino nodes to arrive, I’d travel anywhere in Europe in the fall to share anything I may have learned or mainly, to glean more information and meet like minds.
However, that all probably goes without saying, but there will be two things preying on my mind;
A. how do I build working nodes at a reasonable price?
B. how do I debug/test my nodes, and what are the best practices I should be following?
When it comes to A. I would certainly like to meet representatives of suppliers, and I’d have cash in pocket to ramp up from my 2 nodes to dozens.
It might already be late in the day to organise this “trade show” feature, but that might be another way of funding this endeavour.
From an European perspective I buy kit from various small online suppliers - if they were invited do you think they’d come? When it comes to Chinese suppliers, would a slightly later winter conference tempt them do you think?
) if you charge the companies for presenting at the fair it keeps the costs for visitors down.