Episode: 765
Title: HPR0765: South East Linux Fest organizers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0765/hpr0765.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:05:17

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Hi everyone, this is Quattu and I'm here at the Southeast Lynch Fest, 2011 with Jeremy
Sands, who I interviewed on the first or second year.
No, that was at OLF anyways.
All right, well anyway, hey, Jeremy, how's it going?
Very busy.
Very good.
Yeah, actually, I wanted to, first of all, say that so far it's looking great.
It's really, really, really cool and actually, I don't know if you noticed, but the fest
actually kind of started sort of like without everyone, I mean like the exhibition hall,
I don't think it opens till tomorrow, right?
Yeah.
But everyone was setting up and so everyone was like flooding in and like taking all the
stuff and meeting all the people.
Yeah, we, we had started just to roll tables out to set them up just to know where to
put our powders and all that and because we had, we had a few things going on, we didn't
expect it to be that big because we've never had anything really substantial on Friday
and as it turns out, our first Friday speaker track was frequently standing room only.
And so vendors came in to look around and said, oh, there's people and they just started
setting up their booths.
So here we are in more than half the major booths are set up and sort of ready to roll.
That's really cool.
I heard that you guys had to increase the hotel a lot, matter something, is that correct?
Yeah, we ran out of rooms probably seven times.
But if, if the hotel had more rooms and we could keep selling up till the date, we would
have probably more than doubled our room sales.
Yeah, wow.
So what happened?
Like, did you guys go kick into a higher gear on campaign marketing or?
I wouldn't say that I have no idea because it was on, registrations were down.
Yeah.
Even though room nights are through the roof, so I mean, looking around, it looks like
there's clearly a lot more people here.
I just, I don't have a grasp for you.
I mean, it, for a while, we actually had more room nights than registrations and, and
because I get to see the room night reports and it's not like that was one person per
room.
Some of the rooms have five, six people in them.
So, yeah.
Well, so how bad is it if people don't register?
Like, because I think actually I didn't register, so I mean, does that throw you guys off?
Is it better for people to?
So, for our, for our general stuff, for the, for the tracks, it's because it's self-self-organizes.
It's not that bad.
For the affiliate events like LPI and BSDA, where we need to keep a head count to make
sure we don't overflow the rooms here and our oversell, it's more important there.
It's really not that big of a deal elsewhere, just make sure, because we're, we're the,
the space that we have for our affiliate events like Drupal Camp is fluid space.
So, if somebody goes over, we can sort of adjust to accommodate, but if we don't have
that head count, we just don't know.
And we'd prefer to have seats for everybody instead of standing around, if possible.
Yeah.
Cool.
Can you briefly tell me, I mean, I know you're busy, but I just kind of give people an
idea of what exactly happens the, the day before, because all I see is like this blur
of you guys screwing around, making things happen, just kind of wondering what, what's going
on?
Um, so, lots of just last-minute stuff you never think of like, ooh, we need Gaffer's
tape.
Ooh, we need to pull out 5,000 feet of cat five people, PVC.
We've spent quite a lot of time hammering on network today to get a network up, because
that really tanked last year, thanks to AT&T, and they tried to tank us this year, but
we were on top of it, organizing things, making sure we have the hotel, uh, all the meal
volumes they're expecting, because you have to turn that in, because the chef has to prepare
all those.
Right.
Um, making sure, sitting down with the hotel staff and making sure we have AV where we
need AV, when we need AV, and all the different rooms set up in every single room, when we
need them, so on and so forth, it's, it's, it's a big front end lead up on logistics
and then once it starts happening, you know, distress, you know, just, it's all downhill
from there.
It's already gone great.
Uh, it's been a lot of fun already, and I guess we're all off to go have a party at the
pre-party.
Yeah, so, uh, you know, I've, I've probably, so people came in and they got some drink
tickets, and then a sponsor gave some more drink tickets, and now they're heading to
somewhere else where different sponsors are gonna give some more drink tickets.
Okay, cool.
So we're gonna make sure that our attendees are well socially lubricated.
All right, thanks again for a great fest.
Thank you for a superb program, God.
Oh, no problem.
Thanks for the, the little tip of the hat.
All right, bye.
Thank you for that.
Hi, everyone.
This is Collette, too.
I'm here at Southeast Linux Fest, 2011, and I'm sitting here with, uh, the presidents
of self, I think, still, right?
When's your last chance?
This, this technically is it.
I don't know if we're gonna have an election or not, we sort of met and decided who was
going to shuffle the whole position, but it never came up without me vacating my seat.
I, I told the idea of bringing up, I sort of said, well, does anybody else think somebody
should move?
Right.
Nobody says anything.
Nobody's asking to move yet.
Right.
My wife has not realized my three-year term as well.
That's right.
It's 60 to 80% chance that I'm back next year, they're in the same role.
Okay.
I guess I'm not discouraged enough to give it up.
That's great.
It doesn't feel so neglecty to do the half day, so we'll see what happens, but more
and likely next year, too.
Okay.
Cool.
Well, I mean, I have to say that the festival is going great already, and I don't remember,
I don't know if I wasn't here on Friday last time, or if I just didn't notice it or what,
but it seems like it's in full swing already.
Yeah, it does.
It's been a day of the festival already.
This year we did, hey, I think last year we had a pre-party and maybe a half a day
of UberCon or something on Friday.
This year we had an all-day speaker track dedicated to build-up source cloud day and
a half a day of just self, like the first speaker track of self, general topics.
So we had three things going on, you know, counting that UberCon and enough going on speaker-wise
and attendee-wise, we either had probably 30% of the vendors go ahead and set up today.
So we may entertain starting that expo for early next year, but yeah.
Yeah, I think we got a good turnout for Friday.
Yeah, me too, I think it's an amazing turnout.
So I guess you guys sold out of hotel rooms from what Jeremy said, or we had to expand
or something.
We had to expand our block, probably, three or four times, I mean, to the point that
they finally said, you don't have any place else to expand, I'm thinking we came close
to, if not exceeding double, the requirement of room nights to be sold, so I think we
had over 400.
I don't know.
Yeah.
The hotel may hold 250 and not, so for a three-day event, we almost doubled, you know,
sold it at two days, two nights, two nights, yeah, almost.
So what, I asked Jeremy this too, I mean, so what happened, like, did you guys just better
marketing?
No, I think we actually did a worse job of marketing this year, which is something we
decided we were going to work on this year, but we dropped that ball a little bit.
But I think it's just year number three, we got a little bit more name recognition.
Yeah.
It's the third year, so people know all of us, we got repeat business and word of mouth
mainly, but we didn't do as good a job.
We hit the podcast, we hit the magazine ads, we did interviews, but we really dropped
the ball on the Linux PR sites and news sites.
We did, thanks to Jeremy, get on MSNBC yesterday on their website, a guy from Likewise Open
Source.
No, some of NBC, and he, MSNBC, he posted the story that they published about Likewise
Open Source being at the South East, that happened yesterday, it's a little bit too late,
but it's still pretty cheap to see it.
Yeah, that's really cool.
It makes news out, but yeah.
Oh, it's really neat.
Did they have your name personally in line up there?
I doubt it.
I'm not like in red tag, it was probably Jeremy's name, which is probably because he's
done a lot this year.
Jeremy's single that had many kids in between, we had one over now who's house burnt down
this year.
We had, I've got two kids and had family obligations, we've had, Dave and Natalie, I think changed
jobs this year.
So we've had a lot of life changing stuff going over, Jeremy has had a lot of time, I think
he's graduating college and to devote to this, and he helped us a lot this year, he always
helps us.
I think his role is changing next year, he's done a great job of speaker coordinator,
but I think next year he's vendor coordinator, and moving somebody else into the speaker
coordinator.
Okay.
How are you guys doing on the back end, I guess, are you looking for more people to jump
in?
Yes, yes.
I was supposed to before tomorrow morning's keynote decide exactly how to say that we're
looking for, hey, next year, I don't think we're as in dire straits as I thought we were
last year.
We needed to do something last year because we were working with a skeleton crew this year,
we worked with 80% of what we need probably.
We'd like to be at 100%, and I think we've sort of not been very successful in knowing
how to ask for the kind of help we need, so I think we're going to open it up and maybe
maybe have some kind of, make an airport self-help form or some way, self-help, it sounds
like it's the best I've got, or if you want to volunteer your sources, what kind of things
do you get at?
So, maybe we'll have a pool of people we can call for, or whatever.
What's the best way for people to kind of keep up to date, I mean, after the fast,
to keep up to date with what's going on on the planning and how can they help, you
know, where should they just go to the site?
Go to the site if you want, if you want an update, just go to the site, southeastern.esfest.org.
If you want to know when we're going to release video and audio, and there'll be a link
to the wiki, which you may have some information.
I think the best place to be RSC right now is at southeastern.esfest at RSC.esfest.esfest.
There's somebody in there all the time, but every Tuesday night we meet, starting in
nine.
Okay.
A mixture of time.
There's always somebody in the room.
It's just an active room.
You're around and introduce yourself, tell us, you know, if you've been to self, if
you want to help where you're from, what kind of things you'd like to see.
My coming in to being involved with self at all is, I talked about it once, to a group
of deaf ears, and then somebody decided that it would be a good idea, and I was sort of
moved by other people's inertia and getting involved, and then it's sort of like, I've
had support.
A group of us have done it, but if you want to help, let us know when we will move
you into where you want to be, how you can contribute, what area you want to be.
So I guess that's your question, let us be aware of what you want to do, or how you
think you can help.
And we'll let you know how you can start, so I guess not to talk about it, but to do.
Yeah.
Well, so far the festival is looking, I mean, it's been a lot of fun already.
I still can't believe that it's only the first day, so I will catch up with you probably
tomorrow, you know, a little bit afterwards after we've been there a little bit more of
the fun.
You can do that.
Yeah.
And tomorrow morning to be, today was a dry run, because we were like at the third speed
as far as volume of things happened.
Yeah.
Tomorrow I'll be busy to start with, but once we get it rolling, it should just sort of,
the community will take the bottom line just as for the past two years, so the thing
of beauty about this community is how they just do.
It's very cool.
So, thanks again for a great fest, and I'll talk to you later.
Yeah.
Thanks.
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