Background
Back in November 2002, just before Linux.Conf.Au 2003 was to be held in Perth, Dan Shearer and myself started talking about how it'd be great to bring the conference to Adelaide in 2004.
We talked with LinuxSA organiser, Geoffrey Bennett, and went from there to put together our bid. At LCA2003 we presented what we had to Linux Australia, and after some consultation with the Canberra bid team, Steven Hanley decided to go for 2005 instead, letting us Adelaide guys run with LCA2004.
What happened next
We formed a core team of organisers, which did change over the 14 months it took to organise the conference, and ended up being:
- Michael Davies (lead organiser),
- Geoffrey Bennett,
- Lindy Bennett,
- Glen Turner,
- Dan Shearer,
- Phil Hutton,
- Ryan Verner,
- David Lloyd, and
- Paul Schulz.
We met monthly for about 6 months, then as we started to panic, it became fortnightly, then weekly and finally almost every day the week before the conference. We ate far too much pizza, and pulled a couple of all nighters. The team was fantastic - doing whatever it took to pull the conference off. Personally, I spent over 1200 hours over 14 months organising this event. It was fantastic, very exhausting, but very worthwhile.
The statistics
We ended up having 540 attendees (which was more than 25% more than LCA2003 :-) from 14 countries. We had about 50 people help out running the conference in some form or other. We had 46 speakers. We had 7 mini-conferences. We had IBM, Oracle, Sun, Apple, HP and 10 other companies sponsor us. We raised over AUD 14,500 for charity. We gave away over AUD 45,000 worth of prizes. I dunked Linus (video). We provide LPI exams cheap for conference attendees. We produced a conference CD and DVD which are freely available. We had 24x7 wireless coverage over the conference venue and Adelaide CBD. We provided free speaker coaching for anyone. We provided free icecream for attendes. We had PDF maps of the conference venue to help people get around. We had only one person complain about anything. And we had a lot of fun.
Quotes
"This is the best conference I've ever been to"
-- Keith Packard
"In summary; Linux.Conf.Au was a great success. It was, as intended, a seriously fun gathering with much talk about the technology and no marketing. Let it never be said that volunteers cannot bring off a complex event of this type. Linux.Conf.Au is more volunteer-driven than most; it is run by a different committee in a different city every year. Despite the talk of heroic, last-minute, all-nighters put on by the conference staff, the attendee experience was smooth and seamless. Linux.Conf.Au came off better than many events run by "professionals." Great congratulations are due to the dedicated group of people who pulled this off."
-- LWN, (http://lwn.net/Articles/66781/)
"The organizers ... are doing a great job already, and I expect some new twists this year. I don't want to steal their thunder, but it's always a huge thrill for me, and the feedback from attendees is always "more more more!"."
-- Rusty, (http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/892)
Links
...and there were many more news links that have since disappeared.
Michael Davies <michael at msdavies dot net>
Last Modified: Tue Oct 19 21:13:12 CDT 2004