[Linux-aus] Event overlaps - and what to do to avoid them in the future

[Mary Gardiner]

Hi all,

Some additional commentary from someone organising these events (namely
AdaCamp). Here's the factors that went into the decision:

1. as noted elsewhere in this thread, we want to capture some of the
   international travellers, so that's why it's in the same month as LCA.

2. a lot of people take time off work for LCA, and pay their own travel and
   accommodation costs. This suggests:
 - being on a weekend, so as not to be yet another day of leave for many people
 - being as close as possible to LCA, so that people don't need to spend heaps
   of extra days of money on travel and accommodation (including the Ada
   Initiative itself!)

3. LCA is extremely exhausting, especially for people like me who are helping
   with a miniconf, co-presenting a miniconf talk, co-presenting a main conference
   talk and co-caring for a small child out of his routine all week. It is very
   unlikely that I personally would be able to give more than 50% of my usual
   energy to an event the weekend after LCA, and I might even become actively
   ill (I was very ill from exhaustion at LCA 2008 and thus have kept this in mind
   ever since).

This close to LCA + weekend + before LCA combo is probably why SO many events
chose the 14th January. (The 15th is also a possible choice, and DDU is on that
day too, but we decided to avoid it as it would mean travelling to Ballarat at
night with my child in tow, and no recovery day before LCA, and no chance to
socialise after AdaCamp.) I don't know that with these constraints a calendar
of events would have made a lot of difference to our decision. There just
aren't a lot of days that meet the criteria of weekend+very near LCA+less
likely to be impacted by LCA burnout.

-Mary