Mithro rants about stuff

Firstly, every LCA (linux.conf.au) I have been to has been really brilliant. I’ve been to 6 other conferences and LCA is my definite favourite. I think that for the conference to be this consistently good, there must be because of a huge effort by the organisers and LA.

I’m interested to find out if any of the following suggestions have been considered and why they have possibly been discarded? I’m sure there are obvious reasons I have missed because I have never been part of either the LA committee or the LCA organisers.

A possible “People Choice” track. This would be a track were the talks are selected by the LA members directly. The biggest problem with this type of selection is that it can rapidly turn into a popularity contest. I think this would however be a good way for the LCA committee to check that they are actually providing what people want, by looking at what people are actually voting for.

Why are the submissions not publicly accessible? Having public submissions would have numerous benefits,

• People would be able to compare their own submissions to others and self evaluate their quality
• Allows the community to check the proposals for correctness (IE Person A has actually been involved with projects they say they are)
• Allows the community to see all the cool stuff which missed out on being in the conference
• Allows the community to make sure that the committee is not “playing favorites” (not that I believe that they ever would)

The proposals had to be submitted under an Open Source license anyway so that should not be a problem.

From people’s blogs I know that you only get about 5 minutes per submission. This doesn’t give you much time to write any type of feedback. However, I think a big part of any learning process is getting feedback on your work. A good start would be a set of check boxes which say something like:

• The content of this talk is not related to the conference
• The content is of proprietary nature
• The content is still too immature
• Could not find more information on content
• Not enough information for informed decision
• Proposal to long, not enough time to read whole thing
• Not enough specific detail
• Speaker doesn’t have enough experience speaking
• Talk better suited for a Miniconf
• Talk by other speaker already covered the content
• etc….

On another feedback note, during the conference it would be nice if there was a way to provide feedback on the talks you attend. I seem to remember there being something similar to this in the past but my memory is failing me.