[Announce] Bids for linux.conf.au 2012

[John Ferlito]

Howdy,

It feels like LCA2010 was only a few weeks ago and yet organisation
for LCA2011 is well under way. Ghosts was held last month and the
annual Zookeepr hackfest took place only last weekend. The LCA2011
team is already hard at work to make LCA2011 the best conference yet.
They have some great things planned, the PDNS plans sound especially
interesting!

LCA2011 is now only 8 months away and so now it is time to start
looking forwards to LCA2012. As outlined by James in a previous email
we have put together a time line as follows:

 * April - The council updates the bid process documentation.
 * 15th May - The council will request expressions of interest for LCA.
 * 15th Jun - The council will formally request bids for LCA.
 * 15th Aug - Submission of formal bids closes.
 * 15th Sep - The council clarifies any questions regarding the bids
              and visits each bid team.
 * 15th Oct - The council decides on the winning city and informs the
              bidding teams.
 * 21st Jan - Winning bid announced at LCA

At this stage the council is looking for expressions of interest from
members of the community interested in hosting LCA2012. The aim here
is to get the idea out there that you personally want to host LCA in
your local town or city. Start talking ideas through with friends,
family and even the community at large.

Don't worry too much at this stage about putting together a formal bid
document. Use the time to start conversations and put together a
vision for what you want your perfect LCA to be. Hopefully this
process will help convince some others to try and give you a hand!

Let the ideas flow and once you have a firm vision and hopefully a
few others willing to pitch in a hand, then the construction of a
formal bid document can commence.

I'm hoping that we can start to see a lot of discussion about
different places we could hold LCA. I personally would love to see
some bids away from the capital cities in more regional areas, which
try to bring something different to the LCA experience.

If you've ever sat in the back of a LUG meeting or LCA talk and had a
quick chat to someone about running an LCA now is the time to put that
idea into action. If you were the person two seats back listening in,
go bug that person to put in a bid :).

The first thing to to do is to send an email to council at linux.org.au.
You should CC linux-aus at linux.org.au so that the rest of the community
is aware you are thinking of preparing a bid. Hopefully this will
encourage other people in your area to help you out.

Once you've done that here are two documents to help you get started.

 * http://wiki.linux.org.au/Ctte/LCA_Bid_Guidelines
 * http://wiki.linux.org.au/Ctte/LCA_HOWTO

The first outlines what is required for the bid process, while the
second give a fairly detailed overview of the sorts of things you need
to think about when preparing to run an LCA.

The HOWTO document is a little bit dated (it was last edited by Pia in
2005!), I plan to try and get it updated over the next few days with
the help of some other friendly ghosts.

If you are thinking of bidding, please put your hand up sooner rather
than later so that the council can make sure you get the support you
need to prepare a high quality bid.

Happy bidding!!

P.S You should set your time zone to AWST before referring to the date
of this email :P

Cheers,
John

-- 
John
Blog                             http://www.inodes.org
LCA2010                          http://www.lca2010.org.nz