[Linux-aus] About a User Conference - grand plans

[Leon Brooks]

On Wednesday 23 February 2005 14:07, Tim Bowden wrote:
> you need to have made a significant emotional commitment to
> linux before considering investing money & time off work etc
> to attend.

Or perhaps your employer has.

> So long as the conf is not aimed too low, as you will miss those who
> can add most to it, ie, those who have been using linux as a desktop
> platform for a few years and feel comfortable doing multi-boot,
> installing software, swapping distros, know what /dev/hd.. is, like
> to play with different window managers, fiddle with iptables and so
> on.

We can shotgun the first one or few and see what's popular. And take 
suggestions.

> Make the content FOSS focused, sure.  Perhaps we could call it FUC-
> Foss Users Conf.  Perhaps it would still be wise to have the name
> linux in there somewhere...

FLUC, the FOSS/Linux Users Conference? The first one can be "0 FLUC", 
the second is "Double FLUC", third is "FLUC 2" and so on? Start with 
dual presentations on Pathetic Writer and The GIMP and you can forget 
ever being taken seriously again. (-:

> I can't see that it would be productive use of Linus' time for him to
> drop in.

If it was a cameo en route to a "real" venue, literally between flights, 
we would be employing his "geek rock star" status with minimal 
imposition.

> Holding the two conf's close (time wise) would also stop people
> from going to both

LCA is overbooked already, so this is actually a feature.

>> Power is "How to boot Ubuntu and then install it on your system" or
>> "My LAN has fallen and it can't get up - but I have this live
>> CD..."

> Maybe I've been using linux for too long, but is that really a power
> user exercise?  An enquiring novice with reasonable winXX experience
> would find that interesting.

No, but it's what a newbie *thinks*of* as power-userism, which is what 
counts when naming it.

>> Admin is "Integrating Linux workstations into an Active Directory
>> evironment" and "Migrating from IIS to Apache".

> Why migrating from IIS?  Why concentrate so much on migrating from
> windows servers?

Because that's what much of the audience will either be doing, or 
wanting to be doing.

> There has to be plenty of small time apache admins who have never
> seen IIS who would attend an apache admins session.

Excellent, because a session on just that would not only be stand-alone 
useful for them but a good follow-up on the above session.

> So let's scale back a bit, and have a small user conf to /start/ with

Yes, very much agree. But not _too_ small, else it looks too amateur and 
doesn't catch enough of the available momentum.

>> So... what _I_ think we should do is send up a trial balloon later
>> this year, maybe in August or September, in one of the capital
>> cities, and if that works out we should have *two* running more or
>> less back to back in widely separated cities for 2006. Maybe do
>> that again in 2007, or maybe split out to *three* cities, and maybe
>> make one of them Kiwi, and so on, expanding gradually until we have
>> one in every capital city each year.

> That is turning into a linux user marketing exercise.  Why not let
> the lug's do the running (with la support) if a user conf looks to be
> of interest to them?

Yes. That's what I'm proposing, but with a layer of loose organisational 
oversight just as we've done for LCA.

Two major benefits in carefully sharing it around are to keep it local 
(drives the cost down for people who truly are strapped for cash) and 
to keep an esprit-de-corps Project in the laps of at least some major 
LUGs.

> At the moment we don't have the resources to properly handle the
> conf/roadshow type interest of newbies, so instead of saying it's too
> hard, lets cater for a need we can see and relatively easily fill
> that already exists in our own community.  Concentrate on those
> already in the FOSS world who are one step below what lca caters to.

Yes. But at that point, you have an immense overlap of people with a 
foot in each camp, and I think you need to cater for that crowd as part 
of it, else someone else less benignly inclined will do it for you.

Cheers; Leon

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