[LACTTE] Re: [Linux-aus] About a User Conference (was...)

[Anthony Towns]

Michael Still wrote:
>>> Absolutely. I was more thinking of Windows-centric ISV / bespoke 
>>> programmers wanting to port their worlds to Linux / open source however.
>> Some possibilities:
>>   * people who'd like to know if they can switch to Linux, and why they
>>     would, and get some idea how to -- they don't want to devote too
>>     much time (it's all wasted if the answer's "no they can't switch"),
>>     and aren't too fussed if it's not too in-depth.
> You're suggesting that a weekend is too long an event?

Well, the way trade shows work (when they do) is you go for a few hours, 
  poke around at the things that interest you, then leave and get on 
with your life. If it was a waste of time, at least it wasn't a waste of 
much time. So the idea is more that it should be possible to show up 
just for an hour or two and get something that's fairly broad and 
informative. Perhaps just having some lunch time keynotes or something 
might work for that.

>>   * people who're using Linux and want a chance to "give back" to the
>>     community in some valuable way, but aren't able to hack on the
>>     kernel or openoffice.org -- not sure what we might want to offer
>>     these folks, but they're probably worth considering
> Yeah, for sure. I see the target speaker for this event not being the 
> kind of person who normally speaks at an LCA -- more the kind of people 
> mentioned in the previous point.

Yeah; speaking at a national conference is pretty hard core though.

>> Maybe we should try a user conference that caters variously to all the 
>> sorts of people we can think of, then get feedback on how to do it 
>> right next time -- more as a deliberate experiment, than a first 
>> actual run?
> Ok, I think that's implicit in anything like this though. If LCA 2005 
> tried something and it flopped, then we'd drop it in the future too.

Yeah, all good things are experiments in that sense. I'm thinking more 
that rather than trying some particular idea ("let's do LCA-lite" or 
"let's do a tradeshow") we might want to try deliberately doing bits of 
all of them then choosing a focus once we see what works.

> I 
> think there is recognition out there that the formula isn't cast in 
> stone for any of these events.

For comparison, while the formular for LCA gets major tweaks, the 
fundamental focus has been pretty consistent -- it's talks by top notch 
local and foreign developers for Linux hackers and friends.

>> Well, hey, it has only been a couple of weeks; and your proposal was 
>> so draft it had a request for "$xxx" :) There's not really much of a 
>> definite idea to have a consensus on yet.
> That's cause the real figure is so big it would blow your mind!
> Seriously, I wasn't 100% comfortable talking about my draft numbers on a 
> public list. 

committee at linux.org.au isn't a public list...

Cheers,
aj