[Linux-aus] Minutes of Council Meeting 03 June 2014

[Russell Coker]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2014 10:12:22 Michael Still wrote:
> There has been talk on and off about a peer reviewed "track" at LCA
> for literally a decade (we nearly did it in 2005). The reasons it
> hasn't happened come down to finding the reviewers, and a feeling that
> it wouldn't improve the quality of talks presented (I've sat in many
> very bad academic presentations).

I have the impression that giving lectures at conferences is required for 
career progression in academia.  Is this correct?

We certainly don't want people offering to present at LCA because they are 
obliged to give a lecture at a conference and LCA is convenient.  It seems to 
me that the main factors for a good LCA talk are knowledge of the topic and 
enthusiasm.

> Additionally, I think it means we
> need to start collecting written documents for presentation, which
> isn't something our speakers have been historically interested in
> doing. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

Would such written documents get read?

I've written papers to "present" at other conferences.  The theory is that 
"presenting" a paper at a conference would involve a talk that encourages a 
significant portion of the audience to read the paper, but I have the 
impression that almost no-one does and that the practice of printing books of 
papers from such conferences is essentially a vanity press.

I've put papers from such conferences on my documents blog where they do get 
read, both from Google searches and from the times when I answer mailing list 
questions with "I've written a paper about this here's the URL".

If we are going to make speakers interested in writing papers (or any other 
"written documents") then we need to convince them that it will give a good 
return on the investment of time.  The first thing to do to achieve that is to 
not require marking things up in LaTeX - that always took me at least twice 
the time of writing a web page (once I'd got the basic content written).  The 
next thing is to get the delegates interested in reading the papers, obviously 
selling books of printed papers isn't going to do that.  Maybe if papers were 
initially published on the author's blog or web site and then re-published on 
the LCA web site on the day of the lecture then they would get enough readers.

-- 
My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/