[H-GEN] Talk at today's Humbug meeting

[Russell Stuart]

On Sun, 2009-03-22 at 17:44 +1000, Arjen Lentz wrote:
> I don't think that angle is a winner. If the bid was the best, it'd  
> have won; so we may conclude that it wasn't.
> And in the mean time there's one additional LCA to compare any bids  
> with. It'll have to differentiate, and in some cases possibly improve  
> - not just on itself but also compared to anything at LCAs that can do  
> with improvement.

The essential problem with this is we don't know why Wellington won.  So
would ditching the speakers dinner help or hinder?  We simply don't
know.  In general was it because we are too conformist, or too
different?  Again we don't know.

Your and Matthew's posts here prompted me to give the Wellington bid a
quick look over.  I wasn't planning on doing that until later, but now I
have read it, I think that would have been a mistake.

Reading the Wellington bid helps in understanding what the differences
were, so anybody interested in improving our bid should read it.  They
have provided it to us (well to me), but on the condition I only give it
to my "team".  That puts me in an awkward position.  On the one hand I
am resolute in that regardless of what I think of Wellington's
condition, it must be respected.  This means in particular it MUST NOT
leak.  On the other hand I am tempted to define all of Humbug as my team
as that way I could just put it on the wiki and allow anybody with an
account to read it.  But having a wiki account is a fairly "loose"
definition of team, in that anybody with a Humbug email address can get
one, and I generally approve anybody who asks.  The wiki does provide
other means of grouping users I could use I guess.  I just have to get
off my bum and use one of them.

In the mean time I will email you and Matthew a copy privately, and
prepare a brief talk about it for Humbug.

When I read it the first thing that struck me is it is extraordinarily
well written - better than ours.  I think that is saying something,
because IMHO ours was the best submitted - until now.  Wellington's bid
document conveys a an amazing sense of organisation, planning and
commitment.  Notably the differences between ours and theirs isn't
because they did things like you describe below.  The major events
remain unchanged.  Instead they did things more along the lines of,
well, preparing a video.  Actually, after reading the bid I am rather
surprised their video didn't work, as the document gives the impression
of a team that would not make that sort of mistake.