[Lugcomms] How the Rregional Delegates Programme worked

[Mary Gardiner]

Since this was discussed in the meeting I'll recall what I can.

Firstly, as the meeting recalled it was a programme that awarded a
certain number of attendees travel and registration (Professional level)
to linux.conf.au: it was usually one person per state/territory. I think
in 2004 it was one person per state plus one extra person selected from
the whole national pool.

Applicants applied to a state LUG (that is, the capital city LUG for
many states such as NSW which have no state LUG). LUGs were asked to
forward a small shortlist of people to the lca organisers for
consideration. As I recall LUGs essentially set their own criteria, in
NSW we stated that we preferred people who were either students or
unemployed (which may explain the tendency to select young people).

SLUGs major concern was the lack of rural applicants: being a city LUG
we did not have a huge pool of regional groups or people to turn to to
do outreach and the SLUG committee did not have a person who volunteered
to spend heaps of time on this. So it's wise to be cautious about
designing a programme that assumes that every LUG will be able to
volunteer a great deal of time to you.

Plus we then had the difficulty of deciding between "I'm a city student
who can't go to lca but I've done all this cool hacking and I've already
picked the talks I want to see and..." and "I've just installed Linux
and would love to go to a Linux conference, will there be an installfest
there?" It is difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to find people
who will get a lot from a Linux/Free Software technical conference who
aren't already at least peripherally involved in the community. This
question of what kind of applicants you want to see is important: if
you're focussing on more disadvantaged people, or community outsiders in
general, how can you make lca a good experience for them?  Just flying
them there may not be sufficient.

-Mary