@0ms I appreciate your feedback. Your points deserve a detailed response.
Firstly, Devrooms have been an experimental addition in this IndiaFOSS. The original plan was to have 4 devrooms (see the call for devrooms for complete context), but looking at the enthusiastic response, we extended it to 6.
The original plan was to have devrooms run in the same room (and the workshop room.) Planned seating capacity was the same. Later, we decided to move BoFs out of Audi 3, and then allocated the Audi 3 to 4 devrooms in the order in which they finalized their programme. So, 2 devrooms ended up in the smaller room. The capacity of that room was perhaps a 1/3rd of Devroom 1/Audi 3 BTW, not 1/10th !
We didn’t anticipate the lighting issue actually. We did miss providing a cooler in that room - that was a clear deviation from our plans - would that have made things a bit better ? I am not sure if there was noise coming into that room from the hall area - it was packed when the compiler devroom was running, and no place to go in !
It’s a single reviewer comment - maybe not even from the devroom (probably from someone who accidentally reviewed this talk). Best not to take it very seriously.
Compare that with the main track which typically has some 3-5 reviewer comments on a lot of talks - most selected and many rejected ones too ! We gave a lot of leeway to the devrooms. Devrooms had complete editorial control, and this resulted in wide variance in the comments and selection aspect. I think most accepted talks in the compiler devroom have no comments, same goes for rejected talks. Another devroom actually did voting (after an initial shortlist) to select the final talks. The time slot of the talks was also decided by devrooms, some tweaked it a bit - some spoke to submitters asking them to trim it significantly etc. I’m not saying that one approach was better, or something was worse - but it was fascinating to see the varying approaches taken by devrooms.
I’d say the location of the room was alright. It was right next to a buzzing area - community booths.
3/4 BoFs ran in the buffet hall area (I moderated one). I noticed the attendees didn’t goto that side of the venue much. The all day coffee vendor was farther away and found sales way less than desirable too. Similar thing happened with hardware booths. We thought we had given them a great place on the ground floor, but they had to move a bit in front of Audi 2 to be closer to the feet.
In hindsight, I’m glad we did the devrooms. I thank everyone who participated in this experiment - the devroom organizers and speakers as well. We didn’t get everything right - but we’ve learnt a lot dealing with 6 diverse community groups. I suspect devrooms are here to stay as they help us adequately represent the diversity in FOSS. We’ll roll in our learnings and improve upon things for IndiaFOSS 2026.