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[Stian Rødven Eide <stian AT fripost.org>]

Hi all!

Being an ex-organiser, I have held back too.

Now I would like to voice my support for Kacpers suggestion. I think
it's better to not have a conference this year than to push through a
suboptimal one at great personal effort for the remaining organisers.

Having focussed on the programme previous years, there were always two
issues that felt stressful, more so than the actual work itself: That we
would be able to actually pay for travel and accommodation for the
speakers, and that there would be a good number of people listening to
their talks.

During latter years, the first point was always solved by our main
sponsor, Friprogramvarusyndikatet, putting more and more money into the
conference (which didn't feel right either), while the second point was
never really solved at all, with attendance dwindling for several years.

In my humble opinion, what is most needed in order to turn FSCONS around
is that these three roles (programme, finance and promotion) are filled
by motivated people whose *main* responsibility should be just that.
Everything else is trivial in comparison.

/Stian

On 2019-07-22 01:47, Thomas Gramstad wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I agree with everything Kacper said (including commas and punctuation).
> I've been holding back, to see other people's reaction. But there
> haven't been any.
> 
> Of course, people don't always read their E-mail, and it is vacation
> time. But even so, it has been three weeks and no responses.
> 
> I have been thinking and feeling all the same issues that Kacper comments.
> 
> The Swedish organization seems to have deteriorated more, to a point
> nearing paralyzation.
> 
> Like Kacper, I believe we could still pull off an FSCONS 2019, even if
> relying only on local resources. But there are two problems with that:
> (1) As things stand, we are looking at fewer attendants than in 2017,
> and (2) when we are so few, the risk of burnout of those few will be
> very high.
> 
> I have been hoping for discussion and input from others about the issues
> raised by Kacper.
> 
> In particular: Should we postpone? How can we go about reorganizing and
> rebuilding ourselves?
> 
> Thomas
> 
> 
> On Sat, 29 Jun 2019, comotion AT delta9.pl wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> From the event in 2017 we learned that the conference is doable even
>> when half the organizers fail and drop out, however it requires
>> extraordinary effort from the remainder, and that attendance will
>> suffer because to ensure growing attendence it is not enough to mail
>> out to mailing lists and plaster up 100 posters.
>>
>> Meanwhile, the lack of event in 2018 should have taught us that the
>> organization is not sufficiently strong that we can hope to succeed
>> without a strong process and good communication.
>>
>> At this juncture I think it's important to call attention to how poor
>> our progress towards organizing this years' conference has been these
>> past 6 months.
>>
>> In particular, we have failed to invite enough speakers, market the
>> conference and keep critical things like wiki and frab running.
>>
>> There is nobody to blame, and if anything I blame myself for thinking
>> that a single communication channel ,shoring up meeting discipline and
>> insisting on clear decisions would be enough for us to carry through
>> on our decisions between meetings.
>>
>> We have a common set of goals and ideals as well as a broad contact
>> base, but a woefully inadequate organization culture. If we are to
>> change this we need to be willing to self-reflect on the negatives.
>>
>> We lack clear direction and division of labours, methods to keep each
>> other accountable, marketing competence and IT admins that care about
>> the uptime of organization-critical infrastructure.
>>
>> The most important work required for a successful event falls between
>> chairs and becomes noone's responsibility, and it is rooted in a kind
>> of anti-leadership and a lack of institutional memory.
>>
>> We have 3.4 months left of the 12 months we set out to organize this
>> conference on. We have 5 speakers booked, an unclear program comittee
>> with no discernable decision structure, no wiki, no promotion of the
>> event, and no frab to enrol speakers in.
>>
>> It is certainly possible to shore this situation up and land FSCONS in
>> November. Indeed, most of the program in 2017 was booked August and
>> finalized in September. I do not doubt our ability to have enough
>> great volunteers for the actual event to run a smooth conference.
>>
>> However, most of the organizational work involved fell in 2017 on two
>> people and despite a smoothly organized conference with in my opinion
>> quality speakers, attendence wasn't stellar.
>>
>> In the end, aren't we organizing this conference because we hope it
>> will be relevant as a counterbalance in these times which have a dark
>> outlook for democracy and freedom of expression?
>>
>> That relevance depends on attendence.
>>
>> As much as it pains me to suggest this, wouldn't it be better for us
>> to postpone the event to a different year?
>> This would allow us to reorganize ourselves and have a chance at
>> success another time.
>>
>> -Kacper