[LAC-19] Questions for Open Discussion after Friday's Meeting

[Romain Michon]

Hi everyone,

Friday's meeting went pretty well! We mostly talked about the overall
organization of the conference. I think we're pretty much on top of all the
urgent subjects and we should be able to send the CfP sometimes next week
once Frank is done stetting up the submission portal.

Beside that, here are a few things that we talked about and where it'd be
nice to have everyone's opinion (I'll just try to spit out everything that
we said and that I can remember):

*Diversity*
As most of you know, LAC is not the most diverse conference on earth... How
can we improve that? Bruno suggested that we should reach out to local
organizations (e.g., women in tech, etc.) and that we shouldn't be too
sectarian in terms of their use of linux, etc. Do you have any suggestions
about this? I think that's a great idea.
Lots of people use Linux without even thinking about it. I'm thinking about
the Makers community that uses embedded systems, etc. I'm sure there are
plenty of groups working on this kind of things in the bay area and they
probably have diversity programs/initiatives, etc. More generally, that
might be a good way to attract more people to the conference and to get
external sources of funding. Getting a female keynote might help too (see
next point).

*Keynote*
Traditionally, LAC has one keynote speaker. This has some financial
implications that were not part of the 2012 budget since the keynote
speaker was Julius... :). No matter what we do, we should allocate a budget
to pay for an honorarium. Any thoughts on what this should be? I guess it
might also depend on who we choose to invite. In addition to that, we'll
have to pay for the travel expenses of this person and I'm not sure if
we'll be able to afford to fly someone from outside of the US. On the other
hand, Chris suggested that the Stanford Art Initiative might be able to
offer us some grant to pay for this kind of things. Chris also suggested
that Jim Campbell might be a good person to invite for that.
Inviting a female keynote might also be a good way to promote diversity at
the conference. We could for example invite a local artist who uses
technology (and if possible Linux) in her work, etc. Thoughts? Names?

*Sources of Funding*
We haven't talked much about this beside the idea of asking money/getting a
grant from the Stanford art initiative. Just as a reminder LAC is free so
there's no internal source of funding. Do you know of any other resources
at Stanford that would be willing to support an event like LAC. Some
compagnies that use Linux for audio might also be willing to help us. Any
names? Should I say it: Google haha? ;)

*E-mail Forward*
I now have access to lac at linuxaudio.org. I could forward its emails to our
mailing list, any objections? I think that e-mail address is subscribed to
a bunch of mailing list so it might be a big source of SPAMs...

*Template*
Any last word on the template? Can I just do what I want and reuse our IFC
template which is based on the dafx one and which is muuuuuch nicer than
the original LAC one?

*Video Streaming*
Carlos will investigate but if you have any idea or thoughts on this,
please shoot it!

I think that's it for now.

Let me know if you have any questions.

++

Romain
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