[Linux-aus] LA ctte meeting summary 2005/02/13

[Jonathan Oxer]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 21:37 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:

>The issue that was pertinent, was the pre-existence of a conference of 
>Linux Users, which was replaced by the current conference, whatever you 
>may want to call it.
...
>I can think of four possible audiences - general Linux users, technical 
>Linux Users (eg, ISP's, etc), developers who use Linux and applications 
>that run on Linux (eg, Perl, PostgreSQL, etc), and developers who 
>develop Linux.
>
>This would appear to be an issue for Linux Australia to investigate - 
>having previously had an annual conference of Linux users - the CALU, 
>which was replaced - should another conference of Linux users, be 
>created, 

My apologies that I entirely missed this point in your original message.
It's a good question, and at this stage all I can do is quote the
relevant section from the meeting minutes posted to this list by AJ on
Sat, 19 Feb 2005 15:17:05 +1000  (16:17 EST):

============ begin quote ================================
Other Conferences
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The issue of whether there was space for a national "Linux User
Conference" in Australia, complementing the success of Linux.Conf.Au
and its focus on developers. A range of concepts were touched upon;
such as whether a road show, a tradeshow, or a collection of talks
and tutorials were more appropriate, and what compromise between
the community feel of a volunteer run conference, and the resources
of a vendor run conference was appropriate. Concerns noted included
that a user event would likely to be much larger than Linux.Conf.Au,
with a concomitant increase in expense, difficulty, and risk; and
that having an event that was too vendor-focussed might become too
much of a trade show and not be as valuable to Linux users or the
community as we would hope, or perhaps not even generate enough
interest to be worthwhile for vendors in any case.

It was clear that the committee itself does not have the time to
run such a conference itself, leaving three main prospects for
running such a conference: getting a wide group of vendors together
to run it to benefit themselves with some oversight by Linux
Australia, getting some people who'd really like to see a user
conference happen to run it with Linux Australia's organisational
support, or paying a professional conference organiser, presumably
with little to know Linux knowledge, to run it.

The general feeling of the committee was that there was a space for
a user conference of some sort, and that there were a number of
plausible ways of running it, but that we did not have a clear
enough idea of the target audience or aim of such an event.
============ end quote ==================================

So it's definitely a matter worthy of investigation but at this stage
there's no obvious course of action to take. If people have opinions /
input on it then let the discussion begin  :-)

Cheers   :-)

Jonathan