[Linux-aus] Thanks for the fish!

[scsijon]

I use to go to Novell's Conferences for many years in Sydney and they 
followed a form of

Day 0
- for techie highlevel courses, exams, etc.
- in the evening Registration and a 'Welcome to Brainshare do' (re-meetup, 
person to person yap, talk to sponsers, etc. with nibbles).

Day 1
- Registration (for those that didn't do so the night before)
- Introduction Session (everyone)
- Opening Keynote (everyone)
- Split for 7 streams for sessions 1 - 6 (best in main room others in small 
rooms with whiteboards, etc), each 50min (or 2 sessions into a 110min) 
10min between sessions for people to swap between streams or rooms, Lunch 
in the middle and teabreaks somewhere (although with free coffee/tea and 
teadybear bickies always available so I usually headed outside for fresh 
air during official tea breaks)
-' Meet the Experts' Technical Evening with food / munchies

Day 2
- Split for 6 streams for sessions 7 - 12 (two double length sessions for 
all streams)
- Evening somewhere at a game type venue with sitdown dinner and giveaways 
from sponsors

Day 3
- Second keynote (everyone)
- Split for 6 streams for sessions 13 - 18 (17 & 18 were usually requested 
duplicates or specialist sessions and had serious people in only as they 
were late in the afternoon)
end

This was the same form Novell followed across most of the world with the 
only differences being the direction and split of the streams and the sizes 
of venues.

Streams (roughly) followed the lines of:-
         - Business management (one day high level overview primarily for 
non technical & managers)
         - Connectivity (the intranet and internet etc) and Schema design
         - Installation (all platforms), Synchronization (multiple servers)
         - Inside the Kernel (from the basics up)
         - Administration and Support (including multiple user workstations)
         - Application Development
         - Adding and Configuring those Applications that are out there so 
they run without problems

Maybe you could follow this line just cutting your streams and sessions.

There was also a proforma for attendees in their 'pre-attendance pack' 
showing a basic content of all the Sessions in the Streams, with a return 
section showing some idea of what you planned to go to. Usually after they 
had been returned (during the registration process) there was a session or 
two cancelled, a number had rooms swapped and other sessions duplicated 
(when there were just too many people for the planned session to run it 
comfortably).

regards
scsijon

At 01:19 AM 2/7/03, Tim Bowden wrote:
>On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 08:07, Leon Brooks wrote:
> > On Wednesday 05 February 2003 11:52 pm, Tim Bowden wrote:
> > > As Stephen said please consider something like a 'power desktop users'
> > > stream as opposed to just developer streams.  Perhaps this could have
> > > topics like 'using advanced/ network features of X', 'X session
> > > management', 'shell scripting tricks', 'building firewalls'...
> >
> > Yes, but... it's _supposed_ to be a technical conference, it's 
> _supposed_ to
> > be reasonably intimate (`me and 400 of my closest friends' is really 
> pushing
> > it), it's _supposed_ to have deep and difficult stuff in it, Linus did 
> attend
> > the deepest and most difficult stuff sessions at LCA2003.
> >
>I agree this should remain the primary focus of lca,though I have to
>admit lots of it was way over my head.  Even with keeping it 'deep &
>difficult' the numbers are going to keep going up.  If perth drew 400 or
>so then 500 is not an unreasonable estimate for 04- remember it is
>closer to the big states, interest in linux growing, lca getting a
>bigger name & so on.  Putting on a less developer oriented stream is
>only going to make this worse.
>
> > One possibility, a useful one since venues get much harder to find and 
> much
> > more expensive per head when you have large numbers, is the run two
> > conferences side by side in the same city at once, a technical and a
> > not-so-technical (although I'm currently stuck for a non-condescending 
> name
> > for the latter, maybe `Linux OnRamp?'), and allow delegates and 
> speakers from
> > one to overflow into the other. For example, Rasmus could do a couple of
> > beginner and intermediate PHP sessions in the OnRamp conf, then trot 
> across
> > to the `Deep Linux' session for some advanced PHP.
> >
>Would it need to be two conf's?  Have a common registration, just put
>the users stream(s) in a venue not too far away from the developers
>(easy said, not so easily done).  Each morning there could be a
>'developers' keynote and a 'users' keynote perhaps. Let people choose
>from any stream as there would inevitably be quite a bit of overlap.
>The only problem would be opening and closing when everybody would be in
>the one venue.  Perhaps the numbers would swell to 600 or 700.
>
> > Managing that would be difficult, but I imagine that it could be done by
> > starting with a large committee, working out the broad strokes of a common
> > plan, then splitting the committee, each half trundling along 
> independently,
> > fitting into the framework already decided upon, and only minor liason to
> > reduce conflict and duplication.
> >
> > Cheers; Leon
> >
>
>Tim Bowden
>
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