Show season is afoot. I’ve spent the bulk of my day talking to people about upcoming shows, planning to attend shows, and worrying about the housekeeping tasks of being at the shows — like being on panels, giving talks, having the talks prepared, and whatnot.

It takes a lot to pull together a successful show — but one of the big gaps is trying to anticipate the audience that will be attending. What will the crowd look like, demographically? What kind of talks do they want to attend? What, collectively, are people going to be interested in at the time the show hits. You can easily give the same talk at two shows and have a packed room at one show, and a nearly empty room at the other. (And, of course, time slots and whatnot play a factor here, too — if you’re cursed with the “death slot” at a show, i.e., the last talk of the last day, you can kiss a packed room goodbye even if you’re the most popular speaker on the planet and handing out free money.)

A few folks suggested, while I was working on speakers for Ohio LinuxFest in 2007, that people were “bored” with the same speakers at each conference — i.e., don’t try to book someone that’s been at a lot of other shows, because “people are tired” of those speakers. I suppose that might be true — if you attend a lot of shows. My guess is that some people attend a lot of shows as part of their work requirements, and so they tend to see the same speakers over and over again. But the remainder of the audience — probably 95% — only goes to one or two events per year, tops.

As I’m planning on talks at several events, and also doing some event planning, I thought I’d throw the question out there — what kind of talks are you interested in? What topics would you like to see covered, and what things are not of interest?

Of course, I have topics I want to discuss — but I’m looking for suggestions and input. What things related to openSUSE are of specific interest these days? And, more generally, what sort of talks would you want to attend at open source events in general?

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