[Linux-aus] LCA2014 update

[Jonathan Oxer]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Chris Neugebauer <chrisjrn at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems to me like that's the original point of Miniconfs, it's just
> that they're determined on merit by the conference organisers.  Can we
> lurch back towards this model of miniconf?

Yes, exactly. The very first miniconf (the Debian Miniconf in Brisbane
in 2002) came about because LCA was scheduled for 3 days but the venue
was empty for the entire week, and James Bromberger thought "hey, an
empty venue is a terrible thing to waste, let's turn up a couple of
days early and do our own thing" or something to that effect.

It was just a room that would otherwise have sat empty and dark for
those 2 days, and it required (approaching) 0 involvement from the
main LCA organisers.

Since then obviously the scope of miniconfs and their impact on the
main conference has grown, but returning to the "here's a room, but
other than that you get *nothing*: no networking, no video, not even a
mailing list, figure it out for yourself" approach may reduce some of
the burden on the main conf organisers.

On the other hand, arguing against my own point: the miniconfs
themselves have effectively become a mechanism to allow delegation of
organisation of major sub-topics to volunteers outside the core LCA
team. The opposite approach to the "here's an empty room" strategy is
to instead embrace the miniconfs even more fully, treating LCA as a
concurrent collection of specialist streams sharing the same venue
with each stream organised by a different volunteer(s). Put more
effort into helping miniconf organisers do their thing, add miniconf
CFPs to the main conference CFP, etc. LCA would become a collection of
miniconfs glued together by keynotes, a structured schedule, and
associated social events.

I don't necessarily think that's the solution, just putting out some
scenarios to get people thinking.

Jon