[Pdmtl] puredata conference - Montreal

[Matju]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Alexandre Castonguay wrote:

> Miller a dit qu'il n'est jamais alle a Montreal et qu'il a entendu
> tellement de bonnes choses au sujet de la ville qu'il n'attends qu'une
> invitation!  En fait, tous les participants aimeraient venir a
> Montreal pour une seconde ou troisieme conference. Je vais colliger
> l'info des organisateurs dans les prochains jours. Je me demande si il
> y a des gens interesses en une rencontre afin de discuter de
> l'organisation d'une conference puredata a Montreal au cours de la ou
> des prochaines annees?

Ok, here are a few challenges:

1. IEM/ESC/CC/MKL did it real good this year, and are very likely to
organise one next year, no matter whether there is one in Montreal or not.
The Montreal one is going to compete for attention with the Graz one. Graz
is a small city, about the size (population) of Gatineau, which is 10% of
Montreal or so. YET they kick ass when it comes to PureData. They've been
doing it for, I don't know, 3-5 years. You know where the
toggle/slider/etc objects were created? Graz. You know where the central
repository of GEM's source code is? Graz. You know where is
http://PureData.info/ ? Graz.

2. The average location of major PureData developers is not even in the
Atlantic Ocean. I think it's more east than that. This year only three
northamericans flew overseas: Miller Puckette, James Tittle, and myself.
(note: Alexandre Castonguay came with his own funding; Chris Clepper and
Adam Lindsay cancelled). If the same event is going to happen in Montreal,
you either need to be well organised and buy the plane tickets yourself
and get group deals, or have some bigger source of financing. If you try
shifting the focus towards NorthAmerica then you have to be careful
because the authors of extremely important plugins such as GEM and PDP
live in Graz (.at) and in Barcelona (.es) and in Leuwen (.be) and you do
not want to miss those people.

3. Everyone's English must be good enough. Especially understanding other
people's thick accents. You have to deal with (mostly) German-English and
Catalan-English, but also with (for example) Paris-English, Dutch-English,
Belarusian-English, Polish-English, and all of those people have to deal
with the thick Montreal-French accent too.

4. paying hotel for how many people for how long? and how close to
downtown (or to whatever buildings used for the conference) would that
hotel be?

5. The Graz convention happened in three buildings. How many rooms do you
have to your disposal? VG is smaller than the ESC/CC complex in usable
size. (They don't have professional video edition equipment over there,
but that's irrelevant to the conference) I think their _total_ area is
bigger than VG too. The SAT is big, but last time I wanted to use it for a
PureData meeting, SRC had invaded most of the nice space for long enough
that I just decided to have that meeting elsewhere.

so, i hope this is food for thought and that I have covered enough
potential issues. any thoughts?

____________________________________________________________________
Matsjö Buschahr @ Ruby Konferenz, Muenchen
http://artengine.ca/matju