[Linux-aus] [Announce] 2024-2025 Annual report and Draft AGM Agenda

[Craige McWhirter]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 00:26:00 +1300, Simon Lyall via linux-aus wrote:
> From:
> > https://linux.org.au/about-us/annual-reports/
>
> Treasurer’s Report:
>
> "Looking forward to next year, I expect the conferences will adjust to the
> new sponsorship conditions and return to making a profit. I hope the number
> of conferences we run will at least run steady, but at this stage I am not
> expecting EO/LCA will be run again. That's a shame as I've attended other
> developer conferences, and without a doubt LA's flagship is both the
> strongest technically and the cheapest to attend. There is no lack of
> speakers, or
> volunteers, or venues, or money. What we can't find is a team to run it"
>
> Thoughts?

There's been a deliberate watering down of the LA/LCA community for about a
decade. This has come from multiple directions, not least of which is the
ideological shift from being community focussed to everything "open", which is
an amorphous title to draw in government, academic and business interests but
entirely erodes the sense of community and camaraderie that existed.

When most LUGS started, they were hobbyists and enthusiasts getting together
over a love of hacking and Free (as in freedom) Software. "Open" came in later
and was created purely as an opportunity to hoover up money and "Open Source"
has been a drain and distraction on the communities ever since.

Many of us have been at this for 30 years or more now.

In the 90's the various LUGs were doing amazing hacking, brilliant community
outreach via "install fests", hacking days, refurbishing second hand computers
to bridge the digital divide etc. At one point SLUG was filling multiple lecture
chambers at UTS, had multiple meetups every month and over 500 members.

The community has grown, changed in it's make up and so have the lives of our
membership as we've watched each other go through various stages of life and
in far too many cases, death. The world has also grown and changed.

A _lot_ (anecdotally of course) of long time members cite similar reasons, the
feeling of disconnection between the committee, the community and the LCA and
the EO conferences which is an interesting problem because they're all drawn
from the community.

One feeling that does ring true, is that _everyone_ wants to go to a great
conference again and regain that sense of community but those same people have
been staying away from the more recent LCA's and "EO".

I feel that we need to re-engage, with ourselves.

Some of the work will fall on the committee to lead of course but it also comes
from all of us.

When I was the on committee and no doubt up until current committees, there's
been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over identity and who LA is etc etc.

Let's stop that, let's strip it back to first principles, why LCA was founded
in the first place - to make LCA happen - that is the primary mission of LA.

So how do we get there?

Re-engage With Community
========================

There's some low hanging fruit here:

1. Change the logo back to the original logo.

This was one of the first public signals that something was going wrong. We
ditched a charming, cute, fun logo, made with love by a member for a
meaningless, soulless corporate, amorphous blob.

Change it back. It's easy, it costs nothing and it sends a strong signal of
returning to community.

2. Survey the Community

Don't burden the committee, engage a professional organisation to survey the
thousands of people who've been to LCA to find out what they want from a
conference and what it would take to get them back. It will cost a fair bit of
money but if done well, should provide valuable feedback, much more valuable
than opinionated people like yours truly on a mailing list.

3. Engage with the Community

Based on that feedback and ideas we may have ourselves, engage with the
community.

Over the last 20 years, the growth of commercial social has been part of why
this community (and most others) has fractured. Let's find on ways to bring it
back.

Here are some suggestions of _trivial_ things we can do to provide value for
members are increase engagement:

4. Host Free Software as a Service[0][1][2] (AKA Eat Our Own Dog Food):

Open to members only,

* Run a forgejo instance
* Run a Mastodon instance
* Run a Nextcloud instance
* Run a Matrix instance
* Run a Peertube instance
* Run a Pixelfed
* Any tools to collaborate in a distributed way

Encourage and provide space like the tools above for the community to
collaborate and collectively communicate. Run domain name competitions for the
services etc.

Whether people other than the handful of people I talk to would use such
services should be part of the survey - what Free Software services would you
use if LA provided them?

Build community to build great conferences and find volunteers.

Thanks for reading this far :-)

[0] For those about to say "who's going to run those services?" I can, any one
can. I already do and they take about 10 minutes to launch and almost zero of my
time to run and maintain thanks to Nix and NixOS.

[1] Before anyone says I'm a hypocrite for advocating to focus on conferences
and then saying "host services" - the conferences came about from the
community, the community came from LUGs. To rebuild conferences you need to
rebuild community and hosting collaborative Free Software services is one
possible method to do that. Undoubtedly there are many others we can also
pursue.

[2] Yes, I'd put my hand up to be a volunteer in the running of these

--
Craige McWhirter
Signal: +61 4685 91819
Matrix: @craige:mcwhirter.io
Mastodon: @craige at mcwhirter.io
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