============== German Version - English Version below =====================
Liebe ROS-Community,
ROSCon DE 2023 ist von allen Seiten (OSRF, Raum, Event Management Team) bestätigt worden!
Wo: Karlsruhe (76131), Rintheimerstr. 23, Smart Production Park
Wann: Do. 23. November ab ca. 12 Uhr bis Fr. 24. November ca. 12 Uhr
Sprache: Deutsch (Keynote bis maximal eine Session möglich in Englisch)
Was passiert in nächsten Tagen und Wochen
Alle Leute, die sich für die Hilfe gemeldet haben, werden in Projektmanagement System von Stogl Robotics eingeladen, um sich einfacher organisieren zu können (falls bis Freitag keine Einladung da ist, meldet euch bitte bei mir!)
Aufruf für Sponsoren (Veröffentlicht bis 24.7.2023)
Event Website (bis 7.8.2023 - wahrscheinlich viel früher)
Aufruf für Präsentationen (Veröffentlicht bis 1.9.2023)
Bestätigung der Beiträge (ca. 10.10.2023)
Bis bald,
Dr. Denis
============== English Version ========================
Dear ROS community,
ROSCon DE 2023 has been confirmed by all parties involved (OSRF, Raum, Event Management Team)!
Where: Karlsruhe (76131), Rintheimerstr. 23, Smart Production Park
When: Thu. November 23rd from around 12 PM until Fri. November 24th around 12 PM
Language: German (Keynote and a maximum of one session in English)
What will happen in the coming days and weeks
All people who have volunteered to help will be invited to the project management system of Stogl Robotics to facilitate easier organization (if you haven’t received an invitation by Friday, please contact me!)
Call for sponsors (Published until July 24th, 2023)
Event website (until August 7th, 2023 - possibly much earlier)
Call for presentations (Published until September 1st, 2023)
Confirmation of contributions (around October 10th, 2023)
Even if I personally speak german, I’ve been around plenty of robotics companies in Germany, and the majority of the technical people here usually don’t speak german (while almost everybody can speak english). I think the language choice will have a strong negative impact on the visibility of this event.
Just to clarify why we decided German to be the main language.
Because of this, it is the point of the local ROSCon to be adjusted to the local community, and part of it is to have the majority of the talks in the local language.
=========== English version below =========================
Ich habe gerade E-Mail an alle Leute gesendet, die sich für die Hilfe gemeldet haben. Falls ich dich vergessen habe, schreibe bitte eine E-Mail an ros@stoglrobotics.de.
Danke!
=========== English version =========================
I have just sent an email to all the people who volunteered to help. If I forgot to include you, please send an email to ros@stoglrobotics.de.
Restricting non-German contributions to max. the keynote and one talk doesn’t make much sense to me - if the audience is anyway expected to be able to follow a talk in English, why not leave the freedom of choosing the language for their talk to all speakers? I think no one has a problem with German talks, but why not let the language ratio depend on the incoming contributions?
Apart from that I can only agree with Marco (@nirwester) and also as a native speaker I use and prefer English for technical discussions for various reasons. And at least from my experience from other local companies, conferences and meetups this seems to hold also for the overall community that has various different backgrounds.
So I think it would be nice to reconsider the restriction, to attract more people of the community to join or contribute to this event, which I think is a great idea overall
In general, the Open Source Robotics Foundation prefers local ROSCons to be in the local language where possible. This is because we want to attract the local ROS community, which in most cases means speaking the local language. While in Germany I agree that the majority of the working engineers probably have very good English skills, I know from personal experience that technical discussions in a second language are often much harder than everyday conversation in that language and we like hobbyists and students to be able to attend the local ROSCons as well as working engineers.
As I understand it, ROSCon DE intends to provide live translation to German for the keynote (the same way ROSCon JP does), so I would not be surprised to see that extended to the one English session as well.
As someone who deals with various universities, in my personal opinion, I see there is a large number of international students and researchers spread across Germany who use ROS in their day to day research activities. My main concern is that, those people might feel left out, if the majority of the conference is based out in German.
Not to forget, the language of communication in the recent ROS meetups in Germany were all English and one that happened in Munich really had a large crowd (I’m happy to be corrected if this fact is wrong, since I personally didn’t attend the event).
I understand the restrictions, but it would be real nice if we could loosen it up a bit, just for the sake of the large international community that is in Germany (including me ). Probably increase the number of talks in English to 3-4 and maybe also allow the panel discussion in English or maybe a 50 - 50 language proportion.
The other option would be to organize a survey and find out the language preference of the ROS-Germany community.
We don’t expect from the audience to follow the presentation in English. This is what we expect to be financially sensible to get simultaneous translations to it.
This is for sure true. Doesn’t matter what we decide, someone will be left out. From my day-to-day business, plenty of small companies in Germany that use ROS prefer communication in German. And here we had to choose (and believe me that this decision is though out carefully and discussed with many people from the community). Using German as the main language is just a natural choice for the local ROSCon - it is like that in any other country, and I never heard that they had issues.
I wrote “a session in English” which means multiple talks. But as a General Chair – I can say that we will prefer talks in German and only allow exceptionally novel and high-impact talks in English (if we decide to make a session in English – which can be done after reviewing all the contributions).
). Probably increase the number of talks in English to 3-4 and maybe also allow the panel discussion in English or maybe a 50 - 50 language proportion.