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• Devroom Managers Manual

Please help keeping this manual up to date, sources are on github!

Key dates

• 31 October - deadline for developer room proposals
• 12 December - developer rooms publish Calls for Participation
• 31 December - developer rooms publish complete schedules

Devroom expectations

To be updated for the 2022 online event

Communication

FOSDEM uses the devroom-manager mailing list for communications with the people who are organising devrooms. Please make sure you read this list and keep the messages for reference.

The FOSDEM Devrooms team can be contacted using devrooms@fosdem.org. Please try to remember to send individual requests to that address and keep this devroom-manager mailing list for messages and discussion that may be of interest to other devrooms.

Secondly, we create mail aliases <room>-devroom-manager@fosdem.org that provide a convenient way for us to contact each other, for example to discuss moving proposed talks between devrooms. Note that these alias expansions also include devrooms@fosdem.org. Again, please make sure you read those messages.

Thirdly, we can create additional mailing lists for devrooms to use either for a wider team of organisers or for visitors and these may be public or private.

Devroom managers

Each devroom needs to send to devrooms@fosdem.org the list of the pentabarf account names of any room organisers who need to be granted access.

Devrooms managers list can be track on the devroom managers report: https://penta.fosdem.org/report/devroom_managers

Devroom managers status grant access to:

• devroom mailing list
• talk review
• talk moderation during live online event

Before the event

Call for Participation / call for papers

Devrooms issue a Call for Papers.

• Note the deadline: 12/12
• Send a copy to the FOSDEM mailing list
• CfP will appear on the accepted developer rooms announcement
• Browse examples from previous years if you need inspiration: 2021. If you wish, you can ask for review on the devroom-manager list before publication or on devrooms at fosdem.org.

We can also make adjustments to the names of devrooms at this early stage - particularly if related proposals got combined or you want to emphasise some little change of focus.

Full details of all talks and speakers that you schedule must be submitted into our ‘pentabarf’ database which is used to generate our website no later then 31st December. Please try to complete this earlier. It is better to find out scheduling conflicts early, and by the end of December it is hard to reach people. By running late, you also give your presenters less work to prepare their talks.

All submissions must go through: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22

Remind speakers that if they already have an account from a previous year they should reuse it. (Our website links speakers to all their talks across all the years of FOSDEM.) Then you can use the system to review and select talks, and transfer them between devrooms if appropriate.

Reviewing talks

https://penta.fosdem.org/report/review/

Use this to view and review proposals assigned to your devroom track. You can add ratings and remarks in the Rating tab. These will not be accessible to the speaker.

Use these fields for your workflow:

• Event state
• Progress
• Notes

Ultimately, all ‘events’ in your devroom track either need to be rejected, or accepted and (re)confirmed. Obviously, don’t change the state of events in other tracks.

Please don’t change the tracks assigned to any Main Track / Keynote / Lightning Talks at this stage as we have not reviewed them yet and it’s only fair that we consider them under the track that the submitter selected before considering transferring them to a different track.

(And we won’t object if any of you help us out by adding your own review comments or scores to events in these tracks as long as you are being reasonably objective and not just giving your friends’ talks top scores!)

Scheduling talks

Scheduling in Pentabarf

To schedule a task in pentabarf you have to:

• In the general tab:
  • Make sure event state is “accepted”

  • Set a unique slug

    Please set the ‘Slug’ to a unique memorable string (without spaces or non-ASCII characters) based on the title of the event. The URL generated for the event is then: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/<slug>/
    To group things to together nicely, you could put the same devroom prefix on them all, e.g. https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/ada_…/

  • Set the progress to “confirmed” or “reconfirmed” if you want it to appear on the website.
• In the schedule tab:
  • Set Day, start time, duration and room.
  • Make sure Public event is checked

While going through all proposal it is also worth checking their content:

• In the persons tab
  • Make sure the authors full name is present. There’s also some understandable confusion about the name fields.
    • The ‘Public Name’ field should normally be left blank, and then “Firstname Lastname” is generated automatically.
    • To show a person’s nickname, set the Public Name field to “Firstname Lastname (Nickname)”.

    Unfortunately, the form Firstname “Nickname” Lastname is not currently supported by the code.

  • Only in rare cases will we hide the speaker’s real name - e.g. if their real name and nickname are not yet connected when you search the internet.

  • If a talk is presented by more than one author, you can add an extra speaker here (they must create a pentabarf account).

  • In case of online event, event must have a host role person attached to it. The host is responsible for welcoming speakers and moderate Q&A. If you want the host to be listed publicly on the website add the host again with the moderator role this time.

  • FYI, devroom managers will be added automatically by a script as coordinator on all their devroom events. Having at least one coordinator is mandatory.
• In the description tab:
  • Make sure the abstract is not duplicated in the full description - both are concatenated. It is okay to leave the full description empty.
  • Make sure the title is short and stands on its own. Long titles will get truncated in the booklet/apps

Inform your speakers

• Keep in mind that pentabarf does not send automatic emails. You have to inform your speakers yourself. Note that you can use this utility provided by the Go devroom managers (thanks!) to get an export of all talks of your track with contact details of the speakers.
• Encourage your speakers to upload photographs and to write short biographies. If you add a speaker to the system yourself, make sure you include a contact email address.

Scheduling hints

• For the main tracks we change over on the hour and there we suggest the speakers talk for about 45 minutes, with 5 minutes of questions. That gives us a 10-minute buffer for changeover and means a slightly-late finishing talk shouldn’t prevent the next talk from starting on time.

• Related / nearby devrooms should consider synchronising their time-slots to reduce the disruption as people move around.

• If your speakers are travelling long-distance and you’re not sure whether or not they’re arriving a day or two early, schedule them later in the day in case their journey is delayed. Similarly, consider the home time-zone of speakers when scheduling and allow for jet-lag.

• Keep a couple of talks in reserve in case speakers drop out at the last minute. Choose these from speakers you know will be attending the event anyway and have the details in pentabarf ready so you can swap them in with very little effort if you need to do so.

• If you spot a rejected talk in the system that you are interested in, please be aware that the proposer might not yet know his talk was rejected. Contact the original devroom manager proposer to see if you can move it to your devroom, and only contact the presenter afterwards.

  The easiest workflow is to change the track and change the status back from rejected. If you do this, add a note in the Notes box at the top to say what you did (with username and date). e.g. “Moved from Main Tracks to Lightning Talks - agk, 2016/12/10”

• So some of the lightning talks are in the PB system. How would we schedule these? It seems crazy to create a bunch of 5-minute slots.

  • That’s not crazy at all. Please do this. The video information gets generated from this, so it’s the simplest way to make sure the videos are tagged correctly. It would help for the booklets that the titles are very short.

Website schedule

The website is generated from the data in pentabarf. This runs automatically every few minutes.

You can see when it was last updated near the bottom of the events page.

Note that the data gets pulled from the database slightly before this timestamp is generated - sometimes a few minutes before. If nothing on this page changed, the date won’t be updated. https://fosdem.org/2022/sitemap.xml shows the last modified date for every page on the site.

If the system detects an inconsistency in the data, it stops updating the site until this is corrected in the database.

Troubleshooting

Pentabarf still does not detect if a speaker has been allocated two slots that overlap so do watch out for that!

• “Event with incorrectly named tag”? You’ve perhaps got some invalid characters in the slug? First one I looked at with that message had spaces in it which I removed. Don’t put ‘?’ in a slug.

• Event with missing unique tag (slug)

  Make sure you use a valid SLUG.

Last weeks before the event

Video upload and review

In case of online event, talks need to be pre-recorded. As a devroom manager you have to ask you speakers to edit their video (see 2021 video email to speakers) and to upload them. Once uploaded you have to review it to check everything fine.

  This section needs more info on video upload and review

create and link your Matrix chatroom account in penta

  Needs reviews!

In case of online event, devroom managers (and speakers ?) needs to link their penta account with an existing matrix account. One can create an account or reuse one. The FOSDEM matrix service is hosted here: https://chat.fosdem.org

To link a matrix account in a penta account, fill in the instant messaging field:

  To be adjusted for the online event

During the event

Online event

The online version of the event consists of one main matrix fosdem-specific chatroom by devroom. This chat room has a video stream component which streams the content of the devroom along the day. It has also a text chat component open to any audience registered in https://chat.fosdem.org. Audience can also watch the stream without registration in which case they can’t interact in the chatroom.

The video stream is composed of:

• prerecorded video talk which are started automatically following the scheduling
• live video jitsi instance for Q&A, panel discussion and BOF. These are started automatically: for event with video, the jitsi starts as soon as the video is finished; for event without video (panel, BOF), it will start at the beginning of the event.

On top of the public main devroom chatroom, there are managers/speakers only chatroom used to organize the event:

• each talk with Q&A or panel discussion has a dedicated room with a jitsi video conf component

• yourdevroom-backstage is the place where devroom managers and speakers can meet or exchange privately

• devroom-managers channel to ask for help or coordinate with org team or other rooms.

During the online event, devrooms managers have to moderate their chatroom which consists of:

• moderate the main public chatroom discussion and note questions to speakers to fuel Q&A/panel discussion
• be connected to the backstage channel in case speakers needs help
• Talk moderators have to be connected and welcome speakers in the talk specific channel 10 minutes between the talk starts to test the video conf component and prepare for the live Q&A/discussion panel. The moderator has to then animate the discussion by posing questions taken from the main chatroom audience or some of their own. The live jitsi video conf which is streamed to the audience right after the talk video ends. Speaker can share their screen if a specific question needs a demo or else.