[Linux-aus] LCA2014 update

[Chris Neugebauer]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 3:27 PM, James Polley <jamezpolley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The Council is extremely interested in getting feedback from you, the
> community, about what this means for LCA2014.
>

I'll moot a few thoughts here, but note that because I am already
committed to running PyCon Australia in August or September 2013, my
ability to lead a bid team for Hobart is severely restricted, as would
be any interest for people who traditionally attend both PyCon AU.

Is LCA too big? At the moment, LCA is a week-long conference,
featuring three days of organised events, plus two days of miniconfs
(which end up being more work than they originally appear to be).

Could we perhaps scale back the scope of LCA -- for instance, do we
need a PDNS?  Open Day is something that has rightly been jettisoned
as of LCA2012 - is there more cruft that we can get rid of here?

Are we running too many streams? Dealing with a 5-stream conference is
much more work than dealing with a four-stream conference at most
venues I'm familiar with.

Are miniconfs the right model for the first two days of the conference?

Could we gain from reducing the amount of work that's needed to fill
miniconf content at the start of the week?


***

I think making LCA a smaller conference is something in the long-term
interests of the conference -- as James said, we've got plenty of
special interest conferences that will reduce the audience of LCA, or
at least keep it steady... But the scope of LCA does seem to be
leading to burnout and is reducing interest in bidding for the
conference.  I think this is something that can be improved upon.


I'm happy to work with council on expanding and implementing these
ideas, but at the moment I'm in no position to run another conference,
for the reasons described above.

So, what else do people think?

-- 
--Christopher Neugebauer

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