[H-GEN] Talks at Humbug

[David Seikel]

Hmm, this is long, and some people prefer to just skim the tops of
emails, so...

Executive summary - Due to the previous talks maintainer moving over
seas, HUMBUG needs a volunteer to organise future talks.

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 10:34:29 +1000 Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> wrote:

> As those who were at the Humbug meeting last Saturday will
> remember, we were blessed with an abundance of talks: a
> fast-paced talk by Pia Waugh in her role as Linux Australia
> vice-president; a wrap-up of the recent LCA in New Zealand with
> Clinton Roy in the lead, assisted by Russell Stuart and Anthony
> Towns; and a smaller group under the leadership of Ben Carlyle
> discussing his Efficient Software concept.

It was a very well attended meeting.  To bad we were crammed into the
smaller room at the time.  It was almost standing room only.

> There seemed to be plenty of positive response to all that, and
> I must say I was delighted to see some of this kind of activity
> at a Humbug meeting -- it seems a long time since we had this
> kind of activity.

The main reason that there has been a long time since there have been
any talks is that our previous Talks Maintainer resigned so that he
could move over seas.  With no one to organise talks, talks have not
been organised.

> So, to get to the point, I'm hoping that some of our members
> will take this as an indicator that talks will be welcomed and
> that if you have some topic that you can cover in a half hour or
> so, it would be worth planning to deliver a talk at a meeting.
> We have members at all levels of experience and with a range of
> interests, so no talk can possibly be perfect for everybody --
> but any reasonable talk is likely to be of interest to a decent
> number of members.
> 
> Take this as an open invitation and plan to present something.
> Once you have your idea organised, contact the executive to have
> your talk slotted into the program -- and then it will be
> announced on the mailing list and the web page, and a crowd of
> enthusiastic people will turn up to hear you (and probably ask
> questions and maybe even debate things).
> 
> What are you waiting for?

People are probably waiting for someone to ask them to give a talk, or
a clear idea of how to go about getting their talk slotted into the
program.  In the absence of a talks maintainer, the exec members do the
job.  The secretaries job is to look after the day to day running of
HUMBUG, deal with correspondence, and make sure things get done.  In
other words, as well as doing almost everything else, it's usually me
that has to deal with people wanting to do talks.

I call for a volunteer to take on the task of organising talks for
HUMBUG meetings.  We don't need to fill every meeting with wall to wall
talks, or even have a talk every meeting, just whatever can be
organised.  At the moment, there is a big interest from people wanting
to give talks, so initially the job will simply be one of scheduling.
Later the job will require responding to anybody that wants to give a
talk, finding people to give talks and convincing then to do so, and
taking care of any scheduling conflicts when everybody wants to have
their talk at the same time.

Apparently there are already deals in place to exchange talks with
other user groups.  As I understand it, we are in the black in all
those deals.  Someone owes us some talks.  B-)
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