[Announce] LCA2014 update

[James Polley]

*Back in April, we announced[1] the call for bids from parties interested
in hosting LCA 2014. According to the timeline posted then, we should now
be in the final stages of meeting with bid teams and visiting the proposed
venus, ready to make a decision in the next few weeks.

This task turns out to be trivially simple, because to date we have not
received any bids. Several teams and individuals have expressed an
interest, but the number of bids received is zero.

The Council is extremely interested in getting feedback from you, the
community, about what this means for LCA2014.

When CALU was held back in 1999, it was the only such conference serving
the nascent open source community in the region. 15 years later, this is no
longer the case: we now have a whole list Wordcamp, Drupal Down Under,
Pycon-AU, Barcamp, Joomla Day - and those are just the ones that run as
Linux Australia subcommittees! There’s also OSDC, Pycons in NZ and
Singapore, and there’s a Rubyconf scheduled for Melbourne next year. Not
only do we have Linux user groups in most major cities, but
http://opensource.meetup.com/cities/au/melbourne/ and
http://opensource.meetup.com/cities/au/sydney/ and
http://opensource.meetup.com/cities/au/brisbane/ list a dazzling array of
meetings.

Maybe the community is spoiled for choice and doesn’t need Linux.conf.au to
stay accessible any more? The idea of having the conference run by paid
professionals rather than volunteers has been mooted in the past, but
always rejected because the community clearly wanted LCA to remain
accessible to as broad a segment of the community as possible. Maybe this
has changed?

Maybe we should just give it a break and see if we get any bids for 2015?

As a community we need to ask ourselves an important question: does anyone
here want to go to LCA in 2014? If you do and know some other people who do
as well then now might be the time to put in a bid, or LCA2014 may just not
happen.

The council is opening the bidding process for another three weeks. We
encourage anyone thinking they’d like to be part of a bid process to use
our mailing lists and wiki to collaborate - maybe a geographically
dispersed team might be able to get a bid together.*
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