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

Fri Jan 17 18:28:52 AEDT 2025

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 at 15:21, Matt Cengia via linux-aus <
linux-aus at lists.linux.org.au> wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> In light of this report, what's stopping you, the reader (as opposed to a
> specific addressee), putting your hand up to run, or help run, a
> conference? In other words, is there anything that could convince you to
> help? Some sort of support, mentorship etc?
>
> I'll go first: for me, my life (and career) is in a bit of flux currently,
> and I already have a volunteer role (as a scout leader) that takes up a
> fair chunk of my free time, so I currently don't have the capacity to take
> on more. I helped run PyConAU 2023 as their Inclusion and Welcoming
> coordinator, and that worked well because it was a relatively discrete
> role. For years, folks have suggested I should put in a bid to run an LCA,
> and I've no doubt I could do it from a skills perspective, but it's such a
> huge time commitment that it feels irresponsible to commit to given what I
> already have on my plate, and I'm not sure there's a good solution to
> reduce the commitment required by the director and core team for a
> conference of this size.
>
> How about you, reader? What would need to change for *you* to say "yes" to
> being on the core team? Change is made by the folks who show up; wouldn't
> it be cool if that were you?
>

I'm in a similar position - my life + career is in flux right now on
multiple fronts, and I'm secretary of a local housing advocacy group that
eats up several hours a week during peacetime and can be almost as
demanding as my fulltime job during wartime (when we're trying to organise
major campaigns involving a lot of meetings, public events and policy
work). This has been demanding enough that I have already had to resign
from another volunteer role I held in my union to stop me going crazy.

Like quite a few LA members I've run plenty of public events before,
including being director of a small conference, so I know I could be a
useful core team member, but it's really hard for me to put my hand up when
I know I don't presently have the time, and my other major volunteer role
is one where if I step away I don't have a successor lined up. What would
need to change would be me stepping back from my other volunteering (which
might happen naturally at some point in the future), or stepping back at
least a day a week from my job. Unlikely to happen in 2025, unfortunately.

---------------

Now for some of my own thoughts, which I've been pondering since the first
EO - which I preface by saying that these are half-baked ideas I'm writing
while procrastinating my day job, I've never been on Council, the closest
I've been to organising LCA/EO is being a miniconf organiser for a few
years, I'm sure some more involved people who have more of a clue than me
have already done some thinking about these issues, and I am well aware I
am dispensing hot takes with no intention for the aforementioned reasons of
stepping up to make things happen at least in the near term future.

I find EO valuable, as it's the only open source conference in Australasia
broad enough to encompass my work as a kernel developer and related
interests at the OS layer (yes, I am one of those people who cared about
LCA specifically for the Linux more than the other open source stuff).
Unfortunately EO is a bit less valuable for my purposes than LCA used to be
- we no longer get the reasonably-sized group of overseas kernel community
visitors, perhaps partly because of the loss of miniconfs but also the
general disruption of the COVID years didn't help. I suspect (noting that I
have not been personally involved in any of these conferences, and I'd love
to hear from those who are) that the more recent growth and success of more
specific conferences for specific open source communities (whether
LA-auspiced or otherwise) has put pressure on both the volunteer pipeline
and the attendee base for LCA/EO. This is very understandable but
unfortunate both for the cross-pollination that is a key feature of LCA/EO,
and for those of us whose subcommunities (e.g. kernel) are either not large
enough or organised enough to have our own Australasian conferences.

Is there a future where EO can be co-located alongside other events? (I
hate to say this, because I have Feelings(tm) about the Linux Foundation,
but these thoughts are partially inspired by how LF runs its Open Source
Summit and other events - obviously they operate on a different scale and
with a full time professional staff.) To be clear, I don't mean LCA
miniconfs: miniconfs essentially functioned as 2 part-days of specialist
tracks in a 5 day conference, despite the (technical) availability of
miniconf only day tickets and the looser session selection process. The
miniconfs were, among other things, too short for many people to find them
worth travelling to attend on their own.

Instead, I'm thinking of something which I will provisionally refer to as
"Open Source Week", where EO is the core cross-community event (maybe 3
days, maybe reduced down to 2 days), with 2+ other events (could be
language conferences, or Write The Docs/DrupalSouth/WordCamp, or something
new like kernel/security/etc), in the 2-3 days either preceding or
following EO (probably concurrently to each other). A shared core team
would oversee some shared functions - perhaps coordinating venue bookings,
certain aspects of administration/finance/ticketing, AV wrangling, etc,
depending on what events are involved. Individual conferences would have
their own core teams with full responsibility and flexibility to organise
their sessions, set their budget, find conference-specific sponsorship, do
their own branding and marketing to their own communities, though they
would also cross-promote the other OSW events. Attendees would buy tickets
for the events they wish (probably with some combo discount). Ideally, this
would make it easier for attendees to justify the cost of attendance -
whether they want a full 5 days of relevant conferences to justify the
travel, or they want to focus on one specific, shorter conference
exclusively - and allow each event to benefit from access to a
broader group of attendees.

The total workload, across EO plus the co-located events over a 5-6 day
period, would obviously exceed that of the old 5 day LCA, but across 3+
events that have distinct communities, you can *hopefully* draw organisers
from a larger pool of people, while also benefitting from some economies of
scale. The bid process would have to be completely rethought (perhaps
scrapped altogether, and I suspect that we'd converge more on events in
eastern capital cities). Potentially, with the combined budgets and
attendance of multiple conferences, LA could justify hiring a part-time
organiser to work on the shared functions and EO.

I have a strong personal interest in seeing an Australasian kernel/systems
conference happen, something bigger than the old Kernel Miniconf, probably
modelled after LF's Linux Plumbers Conference. Holding that alongside EO
could be one way of lowering the barriers to making that happen - we
wouldn't have to have quite as many organisers, or duplicate much of what
EO already has to do - while being able to bring in people (both attendees
and organisers) who wouldn't necessarily put their hand up for EO alone.

There would definitely be considerable tradeoffs required to coordinate
several conferences in the same city during the same week, and I don't know
for certain whether we would be able to make it work such that the benefits
outweigh the costs. But it could work, debate welcome!

Andrew

> On Wed, Jan 15, 2025, at 23:02, Andrew Ruthven via linux-aus wrote:
>
> Hey,
>
> On Thu, 2025-01-16 at 00:26 +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?
>
> Certainly disappointing, and concerning. I first saw a comment about this
> on
> the Fediverse today/yesterday. I'm surprised this hasn't been raised
> earlier.
>
>
> --
> Matt Cengia (pronouns: they/them/theirs)
>
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-- 
Andrew Donnellan
http://andrew.donnellan.id.au         andrew at donnellan.id.au
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