Thursday night (November 5th...god I'm behind) was NIGHT OF BoFs. (Dramatic music!) First up was my conference organizer's BoF. In a nutshell: I wanna start a conference; what do I need to know?
There were only a handful of people there, but hey, quality not quantity:
Easiest part of organizing a conference: getting speakers. This surprised me, but everyone likes to talk about themselves. WIPs (work-in-progress posters/talks) will get everyone engaged.
Hardest part:
defining the scope/theme of your event. This is important because a) you need your elevator pitch and b) otherwise it's just Saint Aardvark's Conference About Totally Interesting Stuff, and if you don't happen to be SAtC (poor you!) you may not be all that interested.
the last week: death by a thousand papercuts + dread
Gotta have it:
Swag bag. Contact local (or not!) sponsors early. For some reason I'm hung up on t-shirts being TOTES ESSENTIAL, but this is not necessarily the case.
Chance to meet in advance; break the ice, get the newbies (and we're all newbies) to relax and make friends. If your event is on a Saturday, this is why Friday night was invented. Don't forget to have organizers working the floor.
Everyone in the same room for meals -- either bring it in, or have one place close by designated and ready. You don't want people scattering to the four winds to eat...they'll never come back. And make the vegetarians/vegans happy; if all they get to eat is crackers and soy bologna, you will hear about it.
Random tips:
Price the event according to what you aim to give people.
Think about having a fun track beside one or two serious tracks.
Record the sessions and offer Ogg/MP3 downloads. Don't forget slides and papers, too.
Lead time: 9 months probably isn't enough time to organize an event with 300-400 attendees...but 6 months should do for 50 attendees. (That's more the scale I'm aiming at.)
Careful with vendors; being sold at all day is a definite turnoff
Re: sysadmin conference in particular: Survey local businesses and see what they need, what they'd send people to see.
Always look for ways to delegate stuff, or you'll run yourself ragged.
Getting people back next year:
Finish your closing speech with "See you next year!" ie, ask people to come back, and to spread the word.
Meet within a month of finishing the conference with next year's organizers and start making plans. Put checklists and improvements on a wiki so that the info doesn't get lost.
Get new blood every year, both attendees and in the organizing committee.
Also got various contacts and other suggestions from people...thanks very much!
After that came Matt's two BoFs: small infrastructure and bloggers. Unfortunately, my notes suck from these two events...but it was good talk at both. I was surprised to see how many people were there because they're professional writers; I keep thinking of this as just my way of scribbling on the walls.
Hey, everyone -- I'm organizing a BoF at LISA this year on conference organization. For a couple of years, I've wanted to create a local conference on system administration here in Vancouver, but I've been unsure how to start. I figure what better place to brainstorm and seek advice than at LISA?
So if you have questions or knowledge to share on:
then drop on by the Dover C room on Thursday, November 5th, between 8:30 and 9:30pm. C'mon, you've gotta kill that hour before Matt's BoFs somehow...
I've had a bunch of ideas lately. I'm inflicting them on you.
The presentation went well...I didn't get too nervous, or run too long, or start screaming at people (damn Induced Tourette's Syndrome) or anything. There were maybe 30 or so people there, and a bunch of them had questions at the end too. Nice! I was embiggened enough by the whole experience that, when the local LUG announced that they were having a newbie's night and asked for presenters to explain stuff, I volunteered. It's coming up in a few weeks; we'll see what happens.
And then I thought some more. A few days before I'd been listening to the almost-latest episode of LugRadio (nice new design!), where they were talking about GUADEC and PyCon UK. PyCon was especially interesting to hear about; the organizers had thought "Wouldn't it be cool to have a Python conference here in the UK?", so they made one.
So I thought, "It's a shame I'm not going to be able to go to LISA this year. Why don't we have our own conference here in Vancouver?" The more I thought about it, the better the idea seemed. We could have it at UBC in the summer, where I'm pretty sure there are cheap venues to be had. Start out modest — say, a day long the first time around. We could have, say, a training track and a papers track. I'm going to talk about this to some folks and see what they think.
Memo to myself: still on my list of stuff to do is to join pool.ntp.org. Do it, monkey boy!
Another idea I had: a while back I exchanged secondary DNS service,
c/o ns2exchange.com. It's working pretty well so far, but I'm not
monitoring it so it's hard for me to be sure that I can get rid of the
other DNS servers I've got. (Everydns.net is fine, but they
don't do TXT or IPv6 records.) I'm in the process of setting up
Nagios to watch my own server, but of course that doesn't tell me what
things look like from the outside.
So it hit me: what about Nagios exchange? I'll watch your services if you watch mine. You wouldn't want your business depending on me, of course, but this'd be fine for the slightly anal sysadmin looking to monitor his home machines. :-) The comment link's at the end of the article; let me know if you're interested, or if you think it's a good/bad/weird idea.
The presentation also made me think about how this job has been, in many ways, a lot like the last job: implementing a lot of Things That Really Should Be Done (I hate to say "Best Practices) in a small shop. Time is tight and there's a lot to do, so I've been slowly making my way through the list:
Some of these things have been held up by my trying to remember what I did the last time. And then there's just getting up to speed on bootstrapping a Cfengine installation (say).
So what if all these things were available in one easy package? Not an appliance, since we're sysadmins — but integrated nicely into one machine, easily broken up if needed, and ready to go? Furthermore, what if that tool was a Linux distro, with all its attendant tools and security? What if that tool was easily regenerated, and itself served as a nicely annotated set of files to get the newbie up and running?
Between FAI (because if it's not Debian, you're working too hard) and cfengine, it should be easy to make a machine look like this. Have it work on a live ISO, with installation afterward with saved customizations from when you were playing around with it.
Have it be a godsend for the newbie, a timesaver for the experienced, and a lifeline for those struggling in rapidly expanding shops. Make this the distro I'd want to take to the next job like this.
I'm tentatively calling this Project U-13. We'll see how it goes.
Oh, and over here we've got Project U-14. So, you know, I've got lots of spare time.