Re: On future conferences

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 04:28:12PM -0500, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> How far off are we, money-wise? Is that the only thing holding this up?

Sort of; but see Josh Berkus's comments.  If we had a _lot_ of money,
we could of course pay someone to do most of the work, in which case
we might be able to do it.

But there's something else that Josh doesn't mention.  We did have
some discussion about doing things with some other conference, or
doing things with more volunteers.  The problem with all of that is
that it is now the latter half of September, which gives us less than
a year to do it.  And involving more people automatically means
taking longer.

You can make your pool of volunteers bigger, thereby sharing the
load, if you have time to handle all the communication overhead.  But
I think, based on the experience of the last year (and previous
things I've organised) that the time to allow for that is already
gone.  It would actually be easier now for one or two people to
organise this than it would be for a group of 10 to do it, because
the cost of consensus is so great.  Even with our rather small group
of organisers this year, we occasionally suffered from the time it
took to reach consensus.  And we were aiming at a small conference
(the actual plan was for only about 50 people, which we exceeded
beyond our wildest estimates).

There's one other thing worth mentioning, and that is that in the
funds group, there were some very persuasive arguments (well, to me,
anyway) that a biennial conference is easier for the community too.
That is, many people don't have a lot of sponsorship for travel, so
running a conference only every two years makes the burden on
individuals somewhat easier to bear.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
        --George Orwell