[Linux-aus] Minutes of Council Meeting 03 June 2014

[James Polley]

> On 16 Jun 2014, at 10:51, Russell Coker <russell at coker.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 16 Jun 2014 10:12:22 Michael Still wrote:
>> There has been talk on and off about a peer reviewed "track" at LCA
>> for literally a decade (we nearly did it in 2005). The reasons it
>> hasn't happened come down to finding the reviewers, and a feeling that
>> it wouldn't improve the quality of talks presented (I've sat in many
>> very bad academic presentations).
> 
> I have the impression that giving lectures at conferences is required for 
> career progression in academia.  Is this correct?
> 
> We certainly don't want people offering to present at LCA because they are 
> obliged to give a lecture at a conference and LCA is convenient.  It seems to 
> me that the main factors for a good LCA talk are knowledge of the topic and 
> enthusiasm.
> 

This would create some more work for the papers committee, but my understanding is they already receive enough offers to run two or more quality conferences. I wouldn't be worried about low quality submissions because I don't think they'll make it into the final lineup.

>> Additionally, I think it means we
>> need to start collecting written documents for presentation, which
>> isn't something our speakers have been historically interested in
>> doing. Perhaps I'm wrong though.
> 
> Would such written documents get read?
> 
> I've written papers to "present" at other conferences.  The theory is that 
> "presenting" a paper at a conference would involve a talk that encourages a 
> significant portion of the audience to read the paper, but I have the 
> impression that almost no-one does and that the practice of printing books of 
> papers from such conferences is essentially a vanity press.
> 
> I've put papers from such conferences on my documents blog where they do get 
> read, both from Google searches and from the times when I answer mailing list 
> questions with "I've written a paper about this here's the URL".
> 
> If we are going to make speakers interested in writing papers (or any other 
> "written documents") then we need to convince them that it will give a good 
> return on the investment of time.  The first thing to do to achieve that is to 
> not require marking things up in LaTeX - that always took me at least twice 
> the time of writing a web page (once I'd got the basic content written).  The 
> next thing is to get the delegates interested in reading the papers, obviously 
> selling books of printed papers isn't going to do that.  Maybe if papers were 
> initially published on the author's blog or web site and then re-published on 
> the LCA web site on the day of the lecture then they would get enough readers.
> 
> -- 
> My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
> My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/
> 
> 
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