On Sun, 8 Feb 2015, Derek J. Balling wrote:
- - Conferences
they do them better than LOPSA does
do they? They do them bigger than LOPSA does, and they are far more expensive to
attend. But does that make them better or just serving a different group of
people?
Also, the Usenix conferences have been struggling over the years, even with
their name recognition. I was at the Usnix conference where things got so bad
they ended up holding the entire conference in one room. It was admittedly a
large room with more attendees than the LOPSA conferences have, but a
substantial percentage of those attendees were paper pesenters (of which Usenix
has a lot more of than LOPSA)
The LISA conference is still going well (but even it is shrinking), but the
annual tech conference seems like it's little more than paper presenters
listening to each other's papers. A far cry from where it used to be when paper
presentations were just one of a half dozen different tracks. I'll admit that
I've only been to one of these since they reconfigured annual tech to combine
all the minor conferences together, but looking at the schedules since then
doesn't give me any reason to believe that it's changed.
Spending $5K (plus hotel and travel) for a conference involves a very different
group than a couple hundred dollars does.
We also have people teaching at other conferences. More involement, both in
visible areas and is support/organization of other conferences would be a good
thing.
An example of a conference that LOPSA has been teaching at is Scale (Southern
California Linux Expo), taking place in LA next week where there will probably
be almost 3K people with an attendence fee of $70 that has completely sold out
the hotel (with 50% off discounts being readily available).
It takes time for an organization to grow a conference, especially if it's not a
vendor conference (where you need to go to it if you are spending 6-7 figures on
the vendors software and the conference expenses are trivial by comparison). How
have the LOPSA conferences been going? have they being growing or shrinking?
David Lang
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