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

[Dave Davey]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 10:51:33AM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
> 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?

Required? No.  Of value?  Maybe but limited, and very dependent on the nature
of the lecture.

If an academic is invited to give a prestigious (often named) lecture at a
major conference, this may be of value.  Much more so if it is followed up
with a peer-reviewed publication.  But if it is a lecture given in
a session put together from offers to present,  where there is no evidence
that the participation was a measure of the reputation of the speaker amongst
peers,  where there was no assessment of the impact of the lecture, and where
in theory there might not have been an audience, the lecture will have little
weight in career progression.

Dave

> 
> 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/
> 
> 
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-- 
David F. Davey
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