Episode: 1921
Title: HPR1921: How to run a conference
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1921/hpr1921.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:10:38

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This is HPR episode 1921 entitled How to Run a Conference.
It is hosted by first-time host Clinton Roy and is about 12 minutes long.
The summer is how to organize, run a conference, and what can go wrong.
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Hi everyone, my name is Clinton Roy, I come from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
I've just come out of organising a series of conferences down here and I've figured
I've got some experiences I could share.
This recording comes from a talk that I've given, the slides of that will be linked from
the show notes.
The confident professional bluster title, how to organise and run a conference, listens
from experience.
The reality title slide, how to organise and run a conference, I'll figure it out one
day, how I organise and run a conference and how it should be done.
The truth is, of course, that you have to learn your own strengths and weaknesses, use
your own strengths and buttress your weaknesses with your team.
Who the heck am I?
I've been involved in conferences at every level, volunteer, mid-level and top organiser,
speaker, bid picker, overseer and I've even done a post-mortem.
I'm a bit of an introvert, I'm not very good in social settings, I hate noise, I like
timetables and procedures and processes.
I attend a lot of conferences in the software world, the skeptics world and the librarians
are rena.
I also attend festivals in the film and writing world.
I ran Pycon Australia in 2014 and 2015.
I was on the Linux Australia Council in 2013.
I've helped organise Linux Confer you in 2002 and 2011.
I've volunteered for RSDC in 2007 and 2009.
Most of my career have been a software engineer in the research space.
Why do people attend conferences?
For the attendees, I think it's a chance to do some learning, networking and to find
a job.
For sponsors, I think it's about sales, hiring people and branding.
Personally, I tend to learn vested conferences.
There's something about setting time aside for learning that works for me.
I've started a number of MOOCs and I've only finished a few.
Particular weaknesses of mine, the social aspect that otherwise known as the hallway track
is really not for me, but it's something that a lot of people ask for so it has to be provided for.
Why do people decide to organise a conference?
In the software arena, it's to help advance the state of the art.
We like to make it community, so we also like to do outreach.
Possibly it's to make money for the community.
And as an engineer, I run conferences so that I get better at running conferences.
Conferences are a unique opportunity for a distributed team to get together.
Don't waste it.
People work better together than when they're apart.
Conferences are often the only physical manifestation of an open source community.
You really are a pastor-battern while you're organising a conference.
And you have to live up to the community expectations and guide it.
Linux Australia is a non-profit organisation.
Any money that the conference makes gets rolled into the pool,
providing for the next conference, which might lose a bucket load of money, who knows.
There are, of course, a range of different types of conferences.
There's the commercial conference versus the at-cost conference,
where the ticket prices just cover expenses or they go towards the profit line.
There's the volunteer versus paid sort of conference.
We've actually gone out and paid someone to organise the conference.
There's the paper committee versus shoulder tap style,
where you can have a public call for papers or you can privately go around and pick your speakers.
There's also the academic versus practical conference.
The academic style means that your papers go into a journal, the practical side that might not
happen. In Australia, I would class events like edu-tech and the hour to be commercial,
and the Linux Australia events to be at-cost.
An interesting example is the Perth LCA, which was organised by a paid organiser.
Even in the Linux Australia conferences, which tend to be run by a paper committee,
the keynote speakers are still picked by a shoulder tap.
So what's potentially special about PyCon AU, which is the conference that I read?
It's run two years and a row in the same city.
The idea here is that the second time round, everything should be a little bit easier.
Unfortunately, we had a change of venue, so a lot of the things that we learnt in the first year
went applicable in the second year.
Everything is recorded, of course, only if the speaker wants it to be.
No one is really considered special at our conference.
Speakers are offered the choice of free tickets, many pay, and that money goes into our financial
pool. That pool is used for financial assistance.
This year, we had $25,000 that we could use to help people come to the conference,
who otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
Many comps are not specific to PyCon AU, but they are a little bit odd.
They do add a lot of complexity to the conference, because you've essentially got half a dozen
small conferences running inside your large conference.
Linux Australia conference has seemed to have a high level of dietary requirements in our attendees.
It's worse at Linux.com for you, but it's still quite impressive at PyCon AU.
And the coding sprints, where we provide a room, internet and food, and the community self-organises
on what tasks they want to work on.
Important roles for the conference.
You've got the lead, but it's not just a lead. You need a core team of folks you really trust.
In my case, it was my treasure who was second in charge.
This means that I've got the ability to go into other things when I have to,
and I don't have to worry about any of the decisions that he's going to make.
The next important role that I've got is volunteer Wrangler.
The volunteer Wrangler needs to be their only job during the conference,
so they can properly look after the volunteers, keeping them fed,
watered, and making sure they're not overworked, or asked to do anything that they weren't trained for.
Thirdly, fourthly, fifthly, and sixthly, Treasurer.
A good Treasurer is worth their weight in gold, literally.
My Treasurer Russell assigned individual budgets with wiggle room.
This lessons any shocks that can come in, but it doesn't mean no one happened.
Who do I care about?
Otherwise known as stakeholders.
I care about my team, the paper committee, and the volunteers.
I care about people travelling to my conference, particularly if they're travelling for the first time.
I definitely care about students, I care about the community,
I care about Linux Australia a little bit, I definitely care about my sponsors,
and I care about my partners.
You want to treat all of your first time as really well because you want to arrange a pipeline
where someone goes from being a student to a speaker to an organiser.
You want to be nice to your partners, you might have to deal with them next year,
and other Linux Australia conferences might have to deal with them as well.
And the whole point of the open source community is to make the world a bit of place.
So if you do that by crapping on some other group, that's a little bit hypocritical.
How to organise a conference.
You're delegating to a bunch of people, you're keeping tabs on them,
but you're getting as deeply involved as you can without micromanaging them.
You want use cases based on your users.
You want to practice as much as possible.
It sounds suspiciously similar to a large project, really.
Advertising is a whole other world that I'm not any good at.
You want to communicate early and communicate often,
and that means to both team members,
midi-conform organisers, and your attendees.
How to run a conference.
Things will go wrong.
Don't stress it.
It's the nature of complex things to go wrong.
Speakers going out while, speakers requiring medical intervention,
sponsors requesting things at the last minute.
Speakers losing permission from their employers to give this talk,
someone forgetting to give the keynotes their gifts.
That might have been me.
Assume technology will fail you.
We had issues with our wireless,
we've had issues with printers.
I always like to pre-print as much stuff as possible,
so that even if all the technology fails, it doesn't matter so much.
Have backups and extras of everything.
Always buy 50% more of what you need.
Extra stationery, USB sticks, hard drives, laptops are a godsend of times.
Metrics to measure how well your conference is going.
The number of people that attended, and how diverse they are.
Outreach, the number of new speakers, new community members,
and the number of financial aid recipients.
The number of proposals that you received during your call for papers.
The number of hospital trips that you had to take.
The number of code of conduct violations that you had to deal with.
The number of complaints versus the number of thank yous you got after the end of the conference.
I just want to point out with the code of conduct that I'm almost sure
that code of conduct violations did happen during my two conferences.
It's just that I was not told about them.
The code of conduct is about safety and the feeling of safety of your conference attendees.
It's not about mediation between attendees.
Fight on Australia issues.
The video recording solution is bespoke.
We can't just buy, borrow, more video solution.
The Linux Australia case is all there is.
Question and answers during talks.
That is just horrible.
I would like to move to a Twitter style Q&A solution
where people are forced to have a short question.
We don't really have a good way of getting feedback on speakers or on the conference.
The web app behind the conference is a bit of a pain.
It's probably time to move to something that makes a half decent phone app as well.
We could probably have a clearer policy for expense claims.
And I could probably put mine in much earlier.
Both the mailing list and the wiki were barely used and the wiki was a nightmare to set up.
I was very good with sharing conference documents for a Google drive,
but I wasn't so good with sharing emails.
In the future, I'd like to set up some sort of CC address that would archive everything
mailed to it as part of the Google Drive.
Some more stories from previous conferences that I've been associated with.
No reverse.
No reverse is the horrible cruise ship Castrovirus.
In order to need an Linux Confer you conference entire restaurants of people
were ending up in emergency on the same day.
Someone took it from the North Island down to the South Island and hit our conference
on checkout day.
I ended up in hospital that night.
Something like 40% of our attendees were hit.
International guests were dealing with it on international flights back home.
At mathematics were asked not to fly.
We had a person with a medical stent who had to undergo an emergency operation to remove it
because it got infected.
The last one was a little odd.
The ambulance driver had a history of working on PDP 11's.
So the conference didn't really end when I got into the ambulance.
The 2011 Brisbane Flood.
Our main venue was moved.
All of our venues were affected.
Some were washed away completely.
This happened a week before the conference was due to open.
Cake decoration.
Not in a thousand years, but I think that I would have needed a hot work permit for cupcakes.
One of the workshops that we ran here at the library was self-cated.
And they whipped out a blowtorch to finish off some decorations on some cupcakes.
Cars and booze don't mix.
Linux Australia credit cards have a low limit.
I bought about $10,000 worth of drinks on my own credit card.
We packed it into a car that Russell had.
We managed to bottom it out.
And later on, I learnt the motor would burnt out.
And even later on, I learnt it wasn't even Russell's car.
It was his neighbours.
To the credits.
Thanks to everyone involved in helping park on Australia this year and last year.
My team, the volunteers, the speakers, the attendees, our sponsors and partners.
And thanks to the Edge, the Digital Cultural Centre of the State Library of Queensland
for the use of their recording studio.
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