[Melbourne-pm] Final wind up meeting and start of new committee

Jacinta Richardson jarich at perltraining.com.au
Tue Mar 22 18:36:52 PST 2005


		Welcome to the start of OSDC 2005.

OSDC 2004 was a huge success last year.  We had a great variety of authors, a
huge range of topics and managed to fill three rooms, all day, every day for
three whole days.  We were able to collect papers for all our talks and have
them compiled and ready for all the conference attendees on the first day.  We
even stayed in the black, finance wise!

The success of this year's OSDC is up to you.  As a committee member, you will
work with other people dedicated to seeing the conference happen.  You'll laugh,
you'll cry and at the end you'll be showered with praise as the conference works
better than you could have expected.

If you want to be involved come along to the following meeting:

         When:	6:30pm, Wednesday, April 20th 2005    (or some other time)
         Where:	Level 8, MyInternet House etc         (or somewhere else?)

         Agenda:
		* Meet and Greet, tell us a little about yourselves
		  and what you want to see in this year's conference
		* Summary of advice from old committee
		* Old committee stands down
		* Elections for positions in new committee
		* Next meeting date for OSDC 2005 committee decided

The following positions are open on the committee.  If you think you'd do well
in any of these roles send a note to osdc-2005 at osdc.com.au with a bit about
yourself and why you think you'd be good.  The more self-nominations, the better!

Committee Chair
---------------
Certainly the biggest job of all.  You are responsible for making things happen.
  You call meetings, create the agenda, make sure people turn up and make sure
the meetings are minuted.  When jobs are assigned you make sure that they get
done, even if that means doing them yourself.  You delegate like crazy so that
you'll have time to do your own tasks and to pick up the tasks that aren't
getting done.

Yours is the responsibility to keep a big list of all the things that must be
done, now and into the future.

On the plus side, this is a great networking opportunity.  You are the face of
the conference and when it is successful it really is mostly down to you.

Treasurer
---------
How easy this job is depends on how organised you are, and how organised you can
encourage the other members of the committee to be.  Your job is to keep track
of all expenses and incomes.  Both actuals and projected.  You are responsible
for making sure that the conference can run in the black.  You will be called
upon to make reasonable guesses as to whether we can afford to give all
attendees t-shirts, or whether speakers have to pay for dinner etc.  You will
need to collect all receipts from committee members and create invoices where
applicable.

You should expect to give reports at all committee meetings (particularly in the
second half of the year) covering both the current and projected financial
situation.

This is not a glory position, but if the conference stays in the black everyone
will be happy with you.

Sponsorship Manager
-------------------
This job is hard work and you will need excellent interpersonal skills.  In this
job you will call up many organisations and try to encourage them to sponsor
OSDC.  Most of the organisations will say no.  But that's okay, because as this
is only a small conference, we only need 5 or 6 generous sponsors and a few
smaller ones for the conference to be proftiable.

This job starts now and doesn't end until the conference.  You'll be selling
sponsorship of a conference that was extraordinarily successful last year.  We
were impressive and that will help you a lot.

This is a great networking position.  You'll get to meet important people in
businesses which are interested in open source technologies.  The value of these
contacts can not be overstated.  To them, you'll represent the conference.

Publicity Officer
-----------------
This job is pretty straight forward.  Your job is to make sure that everyone in
the world knows about this little conference we're running.  You are encouraged
to become more active in all the regional mailing lists.  You don't have do all
the publicity on your own, but you're responsible for making sure that it gets done.

You're also the main contact for questions from the public.  If someone emails
the committee with a question about registration or about papers or anything
else it's your job to make sure they get an answer.  You don't have to
necessarily write the answer, but you need to make sure they get a reply quickly.

You drive the timelines.  You are responsible for making sure that registrations
open early enough for you to properly publisise them.

Location Manager
----------------
Dealing with conference venues isn't always as straight forward as it should be.
  In this job you're responsible for finding a place to host OSDC 2005.  Once
you've found that place, you're responsible for organising those facilities and
costs, organising catering etc.  You're responsible for finding a dinner
location within the budget set by the treasurer.

This job isn't too hard.  You'll have lots of time to act as a general helper
for some of the other tasks.  Most of the work in this position is at the start:
finding facilities and at the end: finalising catering.  There will be bits in
the middle when the estimated conference size changes.

Website Manager
---------------
You are responsible for making sure that the website is regularly updated with
news and information.  Where content is missing you'll chase the appropriate
parties to provide you with it.  If necessary you will write your own content to
fill in any blank areas.

A good eye for graphic design will help immensely.  :)

Partner Programme Officer
-------------------------
The partners' programme caters for family members and friends of conference
attendees who are not personally interested in the conference content.  This
programme provides full day activities such as visiting the Zoo.  You must be
very good with people, willing to help with other parts of the conference
organisation and (importantly) willing to miss the actual content of the conference.

Programme Committee Chair
-------------------------
Another big task.  In addition to keeping up with what is going on in the OSDC
2005 committee, you will run an additional committee to handle the conference
programme.  In this position you will be responsible for getting paper
proposals, selecting talks, chasing paper drafts, organising reviewers, chasing
final papers and compiling them all into the conference proceedings.  Much of
this can be automated and I highly recommend that you look into this.

This is a huge glory position.  To most of the speakers *you* represent the
conference.  You'll meet many new people from many fields and can network to
your heart's content.

General Committee Helpers (at least 3)
--------------------------------------
You do all the in between tasks.  You volunteer to help contact user groups when
its time for the publicity offer to send information out.  You volunteer to work
with the location manager to select food choices.  You write content for the web
site manger.  You review papers for the programmee committee chair.  You pick up
the proceedings from the printers etc etc

Just because it doesn't has a fancy title doesn't mean that these aren't full
time positions.  Without helpers the other positions will be too overworked to
make sure that the conference happens.

Programme Committee Helpers (at least 2 from PHP, 2 from Python and 2 from Perl)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a fairly casual committee which exists for the following tasks.  A fair
selection of talks from all streams.  Assistance in finding paper reviewers for
all technologies.  Paper reviewing.  Room chairing at the conference.

If you have a position on the OSDC 2005 committee and you're not the Programme
Committee Chair you're probably going to be too busy to be in these helpers as
well.  However, feel free to suggest helpers to the PC Chair.



So, if you want to have an experience of a life-time and be involved in making
OSDC 2005 a bigger, better and brighter conference than OSDC 2004 then get
involved.  Think hard about what you could offer for the various positions.
Email us and tell us what positions you'd like to be considered for and why.
Then come along to the meeting and help us get OSDC 2005 underway!

All the best,

     Jacinta Richardson

PS If you know of anyone else who wanted to be on this year's OSDC committee, 
please feel free to forward this email on to them.

-- 
    ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._          |  Jacinta Richardson         |
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