I just experimented with what I think was a fairly successful way to run a BOF, for a mini-marketing discussion at the GNOME Summit. I sat off to the side of the room (not in the front/center) and jotted notes frantically on tomboy, interlinking as I went, with the tomboy notes projected on the big screen front+center. It was an interesting way of working, I think; it kept the ideas front and center (moreso than the BOF leader, which can be a problem for these kinds of things) and it hopefully in the end will be lead to more interesting/coherent notes for those who weren’t there.
Things that I’ll need to fix next time
- tomboy notes are large, so my screen got very cluttered, and when I didn’t have a full ‘index’ of notes, finding one could be hard. Maybe I just need a higher-res screen ;)
- Actually getting the notes out of tomboy and into something like HTML or another wiki is not there right now. I think, though, that this should probably be easy- I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for someone with clue to write a python script that would convert all entries in .tomboy into a simple tomboy.html, with post titles converted to HTML anchors and internal references linking to those anchors.
- pre-seed more topics- you know some things are going to come up (‘what do we do poorly’, ‘other sites we could learn from’, etc.) and having those notes already open would have made things more efficient.
Anyway, it was cool; I’m sure I’ll do it again at GUADEC.