[Linux-aus] LCA2014 update

[Russell Stuart]

On Wed, 2012-08-29 at 09:42 +1000, Steve Dalton wrote:
> One comment from me on this - the bid process itself is quite a bit of
> work.

There are two sides to the bid process.  One is the sell job, which
requires organising trips to the proposed venues and the creation of
glossy looking PDF's and artwork.  The second part is planning how you
are going to pull it off and writing it down.

In hindsight the sell job was just creating work for no good purpose.
Sydney won with a purely text submission, and besides you don't have to
do much of a sell job if there is no competition.

The planning - well yes it is also a bit of work.  But it is work you
will have to do anyway so I don't think it can be filed under "the bid".
Ensuring the bidder has a plan in mind is a necessary step, and besides
it forces them to spread the effort involved over 18 months instead of
11.

On the subject of miniconf's, I think that was one area where we (LCA
2011) did create a lot of work for ourselves.  We did it with good
intentions - we wanted people to attend so they had to be promoted, we
wanted the agenda's up so attendees could plan, we wanted every miniconf
we selected to have sufficient talks to fill in the day.  In other
words, like every team I guess we wanted the best run miniconf session
we could deliver.  As a result Sarah put in a huge amount of work to
make that happen, mostly in the form of hounding the miniconf organisers
until they had their ducks in a row, and to her credit she pulled it
off.  But had we been brave enough to let the miniconf's organise
themselves and let some fail accordingly, it would have been no almost
no work.

In search of perfection we do put a lot of pressure on ourselves.