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Our Blogs Open Sauce The penguin begins the march south | The penguin begins the march south |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 26 February 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Powell says he will be playing a broad coordinating role while Leah Duncan will be managing the project on the ground. "So she's doing the hard work, I suppose," he said. Featured Whitepaper
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Getting the bid document together involved quite some sleepless nights. "The work started before we even put the bid in - we organised all of our venues, all of our events," Powell said. "The good thing about not winning last time, I suppose, was that we had a lot of background work in place. The next big thing is to have previous conference organisers come down to discuss our ideas and help us out with any tips and tricks from the last conference. That's scheduled to take place in March." Much of the ground work revolves around finances. "We look at how many delegates we're getting in; we have to make some rough guesses about the proportion of professionals to hobbyists. Using figures from previous years, we put together a budget that gives us a good idea of the income and expenditure. Obviously we want to make it a profitable conference. "We worked off the Sydney figures (the 2007 LCA was held in Sydney) for our initial budget but it's a constant process of updating things to reflect what happened in Melbourne and we'll be looking at things closely in the early stages to get an accurate picture of what the finances are going to be," Powell says. He said the number of people who could be accommodated at the conference was limited by venue size in many cases. "The venue that we've got (at the University of Tasmania's Sandy Bay campus) can hold round about 700 delegates so that's where our initial set of numbers has come from. I suppose you can always get bigger but that doesn't automatically make it better. I don't think any future conferences will need to be bigger than (what we have planned for) Hobart; as long as you put together a strong bid and a good programme, I think people will come." Volunteers have already started offering their services. "We've had a flood of people contacting us after the announcement, we've also had people on the ground at the time who were keen on running some of the major parts of the project like networking and the like," Powell says. "There were a lot of organisations that were keen on giving us assistance. We had a lot of buy-in from the Tasmanian government who've been very helpful in helping us put together this bid and we've had a lot of buy-in from other IT-related organisations like the Tasmanian chapter of SAGE-AU (the System Administrators Guild of Australia)." |
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