[linux-elitists] [thaths@gmail.com: Re: [silk] FOSS.IN]

[Luis Rodrigo Gallardo Cruz]

Dice Raj Shekhar <rajlist@rajshekhar.net> que:
>> 1. Hardcore, technical topics (like Cox's or Welte's talks) tend to
>> draw bigger audiences in India because of the perceived potential
>> monetary outcome of knowing the skill being talked about. If one of
>> the lesser known Open Source people were to speak on a non-technical,
>> but important topic say, copyright term extensions, I would bet that
>> the talk will draw a significantly lesser crowd.
>
> Just out of curiosity, is this thing something peculiar to India or have
> the US/AU people in the list observed the same thing in the conferences
> being held at their respective country too.

I'm not US/AU, I'm MX, but anyways.

Mexico is rather low on hackers. In our conferences the highly 
technical topics tend to draw a rather low audience. I get the feeling 
that most attendants feel they're not up to the challenge. The biggest 
audiences are drawn to technical topics with a begginers feel to them. 
Thing such as 'get PHP to talk with MySQL'. I haven't been to 
conferences on any other country, but I get the feeling that at least 
in Brasil and India people are much more confident in their ability to 
participate and what keeps them from doing so is, in any case, the need 
for job security. Us in Mexico, OTOH, kind of feel we have nothing to 
give.

Have any of you seen such behaviour in other third-world conferences? 
Have you seen someone fighting it? I'd be interested to talk with 
someone who has, to see if there are some ideas I could borrow.

-- 
Rodrigo Gallardo