[OSGeo Oceania] Fiji's - Letter of Intent - FOSS4G SotM Pasifika 2020

[Robert Coup]

Chiming in here,

I agree with Adam's comments about continuity. I think the success of our
> conferences will be greater when we have a proportion of each year who stay
> on to support the incoming conference committee.


Linux.conf.au have solved this continuity problem with their "ghosts"
programme. Effectively, a group of organisers from previous LCA conferences
are flown into town over a weekend ~9 months before the conference, tour
the venues and provide an intense "brain dump" of advice, feedback, and
experience so the new organising team are not re-learning the same things
over again. Everything is on topic, from IT, catering, social programmes,
media coverage, community "personalities", talk/speaker selection, venues,
sponsors, marketing, conduct, wifi, websites, budgets — absolutely
anything, including topics & discussions that aren't suitable for public
mailing lists.

Importantly the new organisers build valuable direct contacts with their
opposite numbers from previous years. The goal isn't to *tell*
the organisers how to do things — it's their conference and they decide
what's important, but more to bootstrap them so they can focus on what will
make their conference different and what they really want to change from
previous years while re-using as much past experience as they want to.

The costs of Ghosts are factored into the conference budget, but it's a
highly successful approach that has worked well for many years for LCA. If
anyone wants to talk to the LCA Ghosts coordinators about the mechanics of
it I can introduce you.

Rob :)
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