[H-GEN] re the earlier discussion on assisting beginners/migrants

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2009, Russell Stuart wrote:

> Not that is a necessarily a bad thing, mind you.  I don't see
> the Talks Maintainer job as granting permission to give a talk.

I was talks maintainer for GTALUG (http://tlug.ss.org/wiki/Main_Page) for 
four years and in my case that was part of the job.  Some people 
approached me with talks that were not suitable - sales spiels mostly.

Microsoft asked to do a talk at GTALUG once and I declined (after 
discussing it with the membership) as there was no evidence the talk was 
going to be a technical talk of interest to Linux users.  OTOH Novell and 
other companies did do successful technical talks at GTALUG.

> The only real role he/she might perform in that area is
> maintaining a schedule on the web so there aren't clashes.
> Their _real_ job is much harder: to actively encourage talks.

I found little trouble finding speakers in Toronto.  Toronto is a city 
twice the size of Brisbane.  Even if it is twice as hard to find speakers 
it wouldn't be too difficult.  Many people simply emailed me to ask to do 
a talk.  I generally kept the talks planned at least 3 months ahead.

For comparison, a city near here, Hamilton, has 500,000 people and 
routinely gets multiple speakers per meeting.

I found the talks maintainer's job has the following components:

- Authorising talks

- Locating speakers

- Scheduling talks

- Ensuring any required equipment is present for the talk

- Meeting/assisting the speaker at the meeting

Delegation is an option too.  At GTALUG the last one is almost always 
delegated to someone else.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
I tried to change the world but they had a no-return policy