[forwarded submission from a non-member address -- rjk]
From: Nathan Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 14:18:07 -0700 Subject: OSCON To: London Perl Mongers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Boston Perl Mongers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "(void)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Elaine Ashton writes: > TPC lost money last year from what I understand. 16 people is a lot in > such a small company to begin with so unless things pick up quite a bit it > wouldn't be all that surprising to see ORA postpone or nix the OSCon this > year in favour of regrouping for next year. We just lost a whole group of > people today too...it's going to be a long rough year economically for a > lot of companies. Let me start by saying that I've heard nothing, not even rumours, within O'Reilly about this. And that I'm a bit pissed off that you'd talk in public about things like this, knowing how damaging false rumours can be, without at least CC:ing me for a reality check. The conferences group is under a lot of pressure to have no money-losing conferences this year. The bioinformatics conference is (happily) a raging success, and gives us a model we can apply to the other conferences we do. Including OSCON. We have four or five conferences planned for this year, and all are going to be produced with financial success as a requirement. We're doing a lot to make OSCON succeed financially this year. We're shooting to hold OSCON in only one tower of the hotel this year (the same tower that held TPC in 2001). We're lowering the honorarium for tutors to $1000 from $1500. We're placing reasonable caps on travel and food allowances. We're probably going to change the A/V company from an "event production company" (which we really don't need) to someone who specializes purely in projectors, stages, and sound (which is all we need). Most of these things we could have done last year or the year before, but we didn't have the economic motivation that we have now. Things we're not doing: giving keynotes to sponsors, omitting meals, or raising attendance fees. If we all do our jobs right, you the attendee should only notice that you don't have to walk between the towers. Circumstances would have to be truly exceptional for us to cancel OSCON, for at least two reasons: First, we have a committment to the hotel for those dates, and bailing means tipping a lot of money into a hole. USENIX, for instance, didn't cancel their Linux tradeshow despite low interest--they would lose more to cancel than if they went ahead. Second, OSCON is the jewel in ORA's crown. If we were going to cancel conferences, there are other (frankly more iffy) conferences that we'd axe before we dropped OSCON. I hope you appreciate that I'm being complete open and honest here (probably more so than the ORA overlords would want me to be) but I feel it's important to nip this nasty idea in the bud. Any rumour of conference failure that turns people away from submitting proposals or attending is a self-fulfilling rumour. So bugger off and start submitting proposals already! http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2002/create/e_sess Nat
