Recently I’ve been feeling like I’ve been missing the chance to hear about cool technical projects people are working on in a depth not possible at a CLUG meeting because of time constraints.
Many years ago, AUUG used to run a weekend “summer conference” that was almost free and addressed some of this issue. That conference died a natural death when linux.conf.au got big, but I think maybe it’s time to bring that back.
So, I’d like to propose a simple weekend meetup in Canberra. I would make it free, but I feel like the no-show rate is lower for events which charge a token amount. I’m thinking something like $20 is small enough not to be painful, but enough that people will value their tickets. Any profit would be donated to some form of community group at the end, but I haven’t picked one yet.
The Saturday of the event would be organised talks, with the goal of the talks being to inspire attendees to have a hack on a new project on the second day of the weekend. The second day would be an unstructured hackfest to explore whatever is interesting after the talks of the previous day. I think reserving the Saturday evening for board games and general “hanging out” sounds like fun too.
Venue wise, I was thinking of doing something a bit out of left field like hosting the event at Macarthur Scout Hall, mostly because I have easy access to it, but also because it is in a good location with easy parking, cafes and pizza nearby. It would also mean that people could sleep over in the hall overnight instead of paying for accommodation if they wanted to. The venue is not yet confirmed though.
Looking at my calendar, I’d like to suggest the first weekend of December as the dates for the event, which is 3-4 December.
If you’d be interested in talking on the Saturday, there is a Google form you can fill in to express interest at https://goo.gl/forms/EHIvGvDfoceweMnk2
For the super keen, you can buy at ticket for this super speculative event at eventbrite now — https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/technical-topics-in-computing-tickets-27377136753 . If the event doesn’t run, I will refund your ticket purchase.
For those with an accepted linux.conf.au 2017 talk it might be a good way to get a practice run in before the big event?