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I'd also like to add there are a lot more things that the LA council
(and community) are trying to do to help lighten the workload. Some
of these have been executed successfully and some need more people
in the community to help.<br>
<br>
For example, the admin team has long been running LA's servers and
I'm sure would be more than happy to help run email/web/other
servers for any LCA team.<br>
<br>
zookeepr, the conference management software, has rough edges but is
a solved problem. There is no need for an LCA team to do any hacking
as there is a large group of developers who can help set up and
maintain an instance for your conference (at the very least -
hopefully they'll even add feature requests within reason)..<br>
<br>
We have also been trying to get sponsorship and media subcommittees
off the ground. We've made some progress on these but they both need
a little more work (help welcome). With a few extra hands I'm sure
we can get the sponsorship subcommittee to a point where they can
handle arranging ongoing sponsorship deals, finding sponsors,
following up, negotiating and so on. The media team is also able to
help publish press releases and so on for the conferences.<br>
<br>
There are people involved in video and networking who know how to do
it for LCA (and do it really well) and would be more than happy to
provide advise if not assistance.<br>
<br>
We also have a wiki with documentation on how to run conferences
with a lot of information specific to LCA: <a
href="http://wiki.linux.org.au/">http://wiki.linux.org.au/</a>
.Additionally the ghosts meeting helps transfer a lot of this
knowledge and I'm sure most ghosts would be able to help with other
certain things and resources. For example, if you need template
announcements/PR's, mail-merge techniques and so on I'm sure ghosts
would be able to step up and help with that (and add it to the
wiki).<br>
<br>
Basically the council and the community have a lot of infrastructure
and assistance in place to help a bidding team focus on running a
conference. More importantly there are people within the community
who are invested in making the conference happen and making it great
who would be more than willing to help out. I think any serious bid
can take all of this into considering allowing the local team to
worry about what is left.<br>
<br>
Run the conference smarter, not bigger.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
Josh<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 01/09/12 11:49, James Polley wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAA+GJgT3kC8uYS6Lmoh6EAsNouAX4smkm2LUWLpcLaHuKbLPYQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.07754082651808858"
style="font-family:Times;font-size:medium;font-weight:normal"><span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">So
far in this thread, one of the strongest themes has been the
workload placed on teams who’ve won a bid. It’s been mentioned
both by past LCA organisers (mostly in the context of “But it
was worth it, you should totally give up a year of your
life!”) and by people who didn’t put in bids (in the context
of “We couldn’t find enough local people who could guarantee
enough time - so we couldn’t put together a realistic bid”).</span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">There
have been a few solutions discussed as well. Primarily this
discussion has centered on what parts of the LCA format can be
scrapped - for instance, discussion about dropping or scaling
back the miniconfs, or the PDNS.</span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">However,
there’s also been a few hints about a different strategy for
reducing the bid team’s workload - rather than ditching parts
of the conference, find ways to offload the work. For
instance, Chris N. alluded to this when he mentioned that part
of what enabled the Pycon team to be so small was that they
found a venue who were able to handle big chunks of work -
catering, venue setup and teardown, wifi, and so on.</span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Others
have mentioned the Papers Committee - a group which convenes
each year and undertakes the task of sorting through hundreds
of submitted presentation ideas and making thousands of
ranking decisions in order to put together the bulk of the
conference program.</span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">Behind
the scenes, the LA council (thanks to a bunch of legwork from
Josh Hesketh) has recently put in place another time-saver for
the bid teams. In the past, it’s been up to the LCA team to
organise travel for all of those speakers - not an easy task
when you’re talking about flying in around 100 speakers from
all parts of the world. In practice, this has often meant that
the LCA organisers rely on speakers planning and paying for
their own travel and then requesting a reimbursement - but
even then, the organisers have to manage and account for 100
separate payments to 100 separate accounts spread all around
the world. LA now has a relationship with a travel agent who
is able to do all of this work and then send LA a single
invoice at the end - the LCA teams now just need to put the
speakers in touch with the travel agent and they’re done. </span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span><br>
<span
style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap">I’d
love to hear more ideas about things like this that would
lighten the workload of LCA organisers - either by
distributing the burden out to the broader community, or by
sacrificing a bit of profit in exchange for a lot of work. </span></b>
<br>
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