[Linux-aus] LCA2014 update

[Donna Benjamin]

So much to say.

Sitting in Senj on the Croatian coast. 

What I'd do.

Contact convention centres / large hotels in Newcastle, Gold Coast, Auckland and Adelaide and ask for proposals.

Look at business model of conference and cut fat to find savings to hire a production team.

lca is actually a pretty simple conference, and relatively small in the scheme of things. A lot of unnecessary angst is generated by the way we do things, and headaches and hangovers caused by toxic members of the community.

It can easily be done with a distributed team, and a professional production company.

The bigger question is not how to do it, but whether or not we still need and want this conference. 

If no one wants to run it because it's just too much work, the workload can be addressed. But if no one wants to run it because they don't want to sign up for the toxic bikeshedding - that's a very different problem.

Kisses from the Adriatic,

Donna.

Joshua Hesketh <josh at nitrotech.org> wrote:

>For LCA09 about half the team was up the northern end of the state (ie 
>not in Hobart). After we had the bid we didn't have one face to face 
>meeting until 4 days out from the conference. We achieved this through 
>lots of emails, phone calls and teleconfs. I believe a dispersed team 
>can be effective to a degree but you are certainly right about the too 
>many cooks. It is absolutely vital to have people on site to handle the
>
>venues and logistics and leading up to the conference it was necessary 
>for those from elsewhere other than Hobart (myself included) to come 
>down half a week early to begin running all the errands that were
>required.
>
>My understanding is that the core team is rarely dispersed besides a 
>couple of people. Volunteers on the other hand tend to come from all
>over.
>
>Cheers,
>Josh
>
>On 28/08/12 16:30, Charles Gregory wrote:
>> What is the usual geographic distribution of previous organising 
>> teams?  I'm assuming it was a majority of local people in each case.
>>
>> I'm guessing many local areas may have trouble finding more half a 
>> dozen people with sufficient free time.  Surely not all the
>organising 
>> team would need to be local?  Would boosting the team with members 
>> from other parts of the country help (so the organising team is eg.
>~6 
>> local, and ~6 interstate people) help - or is it a case of too many
>cooks?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Charles
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Simon Lyall <simon at darkmere.gen.nz 
>> <mailto:simon at darkmere.gen.nz>> wrote:
>>
>>     On Tue, 28 Aug 2012, James Polley wrote:
>>     > This task turns out to be trivially simple, because to date we
>>     have not received any bids. Several teams and individuals have
>>     > expressed an interest, but the number of bids received is zero.
>>
>>     My 2 cents ( I was with one of the possible teams ).
>>
>>     I think the big factor why we didn't do a bid was the size of the
>>     work requirement. Roughly speaking the minimum seems to be:
>>
>>     " Half a dozen people need to allocate all their spare time for
>12-18
>>     months plus 12+ hour days for 2 weeks of the actual conference "
>>
>>     which is a serious commitment. We didn't have enough people that
>>     seemed
>>     keen to put that much in so our bid petered out.
>>
>>     Many of the other events are over 1-2 days for <200 people. I'll
>>     make a
>>     guess and say they might be a 10th of the work to hold compared
>to
>>     LCA (
>>     Others feel free to correct ).
>>
>>
>>     --
>>     Simon Lyall  |  Very Busy  |  Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
>>     "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar |
>eMT.
>>
>>
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