[Linux-aus] LCA 2023 ?

[Daisy Leigh Brenecki]

Hi all, I wanted to reply to some of the discussion here about conference organising. Apologies for ruining everyone's threading; I wasn't in the mailing list earlier so don't have the message-IDs of the emails to reply correctly.

> Volunteers will always be necessary, but the rest of it isn't.
> It almost happened during the pandemic.
> In an environment as geographically diverse as Australia, with people 1000s
> of kms apart, nobody has clicked on to running virtual summits/conferences.
> We have the software and know how, yet somehow the logical medium never
> happens.

LA has indeed run virtual conferences: PyCon AU 2020 (which I chaired), Linux.conf.au 2020, PyCon AU 2021 and Linux.conf.au 2021.

The thing is, these conferences still require just as much energy and effort. The core team of PyCon AU 2020 started planning our online event in March when the pandemic first hit Australia, and we were still forced to delay the event a month and hold it in August. Even then, making the conference actually happen on time was a huge challenge, and no doubt the source of a few gray hairs for my team and I.

The vast majority of the labour still needs to be done. There is still a Call for Proposals, proposal review, and program selection process. We still need sponsors, since the cost of an online event is certainly *less* but still a non-trivial amount—think five figures instead of six. We still need to put all the community management in place, and promote the conference so people show up, and all those other things.

Plus, there's additional complexities you don't have in person. The biggest one is AV, and a huge amount of person-hours went into making our speakers look and sound good; months and months of planning from Ryan, and one-on-one tech checks with every single one of our ~80 speakers in the weeks prior to the conference. But there's others too, like figuring out how to preserve the conference as an engaging social event in a totally different format.

All in all, we had a total of ~30 volunteers working back stage across the PyCon AU weekend, which is on the high end of how many we'd have at an in-person conference, and at least about 8 or 10 of those were also people had dedicated the previous six months of our lives to making it happen, which is not a small ask.

And while we're not in 2020 anymore, the pandemic shows no signs of abating, and is still very much affecting the amount of energy and spare time that people have to volunteer for these things.

All this is to say: I'm sure LAC and the site team have online options on their radar, having already run two LCAs that way, but it's also important to acknowledge that it's not an option that substantially reduces the volunteer person-hours needed, or the other challenges involved in holding events at this scale :)

Daisy Leigh Brenecki
/ˈdeɪ.zi 'liː bɹə'nɛki/ (DAY-zee LEE brə-NE-kee) • she/her • Melbourne (UTC+10/+11)