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

[Leon Brooks <leon@cyberknights.com.au>]

On Tuesday 22 February 2005 08:39, Bret Busby wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Michael Still wrote:
>> Bret Busby wrote:
>>> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Stewart Smith wrote:
>>>> 5) LCA will be where the best bid comes from. Anybody who did not
>>>> put in a serious bid cannot complain.

>>> So, when Microsoft puts in a bid for it to be held at Redmond (?)
>>> USA, it will be held there?

>>> Or, if SCO puts in a big bid, to make that the "best bid", will
>>> the conference be held at SCO headquarters in the USA?

>> You make an interesting assumption that the LCA hosts have paid to
>> hold the event, and that "best" is measured in terms of dollars.
>> Given that no one has ever suggested that, it shows an interesing
>> window into your own thought processes.

>> "Best" is more about providing value to attendees, attracting
>> interesting speakers, and hosting an event generally in line with
>> previous LCAs.
>
> And, prithee, explain where in the post to which I was responding
> above, did it say that "best" was anything other than that ""best" is
> measured in terms of dollars".

Nowhere did it define "best" either in terms of dollars, or otherwise.

It could be "most orgasmic", "most colourful", "nicest mountains", "most 
glorious beaches", "most logistically convenient", "closest to Stewart 
Smith's home", "most distant from Bret Busby's home (think Cairns)", 
"coolest in midsummer", "best restaurants", "astride the fattest 
bandwidth for live video feeds" any one of a thousand criteria. Why did 
you single out money?

> And, given that a conference has been approved by the decision
> makers, to be held in a foreign country,

Yeah, well, barely.

So their birds have nostrils on the tips of their beaks? Ours lay black 
eggs that you could drive nails with. Are we even yet? They have 
natives with a distinct culture including painting themselves up and 
dancing, so do we. They have parrots, so do we. They farm lots of 
sheep, so do we. They have accents which Yankee actors utterly (hah! 
pun unintended) mangle, so do we.

Admittedly, they have real mountains and we don't, we have real deserts 
and they don't. And they probably need to do up a Maori version of Tux 
as a conf logo.

They're adjacent, still part of the Commonwealth, Southern Hemisphere, 
both constitutions have provision for amalgamating the countries, the 
dominant population is still English-speaking nominally-Chrstian 
Caucasians, and this conference might be enough to seed a separate 
linux.conf.nz (if you ran them back to back or even overlapped them 
slightly, truly foreign speakers could do them both in one trip), and 
so on.

You talk like we're moving it permanently to Russia or Mexico. Take a 
deep breath!

> it is a precedent that indicates that it is likely that future
> conferences will be held in various countries in Asia, and,
> likely, some time, in the USA, rather than in Australia, which,
> by virtue of the asserted name of the conference, is where the
> conference should be held. 

Fine. We'll hold LCA2008 at Christmas Island, which is indeed part of 
Australia. Will that make you happy?

> The membership as a whole did not decide where the conference would
> be held,

That's right. That's *why* we elected a Committee. If you don't like it, 
get elected.

If you can't get elected, you have two courses of action:

  1) declare a conspiracy; or 

  2) learn something about how and why representative democracies work.

> and, as a consequence, what was supposed to be an Australian 
> conference, has gone overseas,

Would you count Tasmania as overseas? Why, or why not? Have we had a 
conf in Tassie yet?

> it is for the benefit of the more elite people who can afford,
> by way of money and other criteria, to go traipsing off overseas,
> to attend international conferences.

Perhaps you missed the bit where I noticed that:

    IT IS
    :::CHEAPER:::
    TO FLY

    FROM PERTH* TO KIWILAND

    THAN

    FROM PERTH TO SYDNEY
    OR
    FROM PERTH TO MELBOURNE
    OR
    FROM PERTH TO BRISBANE?

Get it? Got it? Oh, never mind.

Elites, my... er, fundament. I'm hardly an elite of any kind, and *I* 
plan to go.

Cheers; Leon


* for the bystanders, Bret lives in Perth
-- 
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