Andy Linton
I think you need to have some goal here. I'd be interested in this meeting IFF it's technical - if we get marketing and sales types there I won't be nearly as interested (possibly one of the understatements of 2002).
One of the problems here is that conference organisers have to take what they can get, within reason. Obviously, you can influence this by specifying a theme in the call for papers, but if you ask for papers on gonkulators, and no-one wants to present about gonkulators, you don't have a programme.
The program committee could be the list if we want to keep the process informal for now. If someone thinks they have something that people might want to hear about post a short description and see who shows some interest.
I dimly recall pretty much single-handedly organising the programme (and quite a lot else besides) for the 1992 DECUS Forum -- this was a three day event with three streams, and about 120 attendees. The programme organisation fell to me because I had time, and because the programme subcommittee (which I wasn't even on) had failed to confirm any papers by the time the draft programme had to be published. I begged for extra time and spent two days on the phone chasing up contributions and a third getting the progress report and draft programme written up. The lesson was that someone has to be responsible for the programme, and that someone has to be in a position to deliver -- volunteers are helpful, but if you want the thing done, someone needs to take charge. No, I'm not volunteering... The DECUS Forum was the smaller, more technically focused event that DECUS ran each year (there was a larger Conference) and was always held in February so that we could use University facilities and halls of residence. That kept the costs down to manageable proportions so that techies could attend regularly. Is that a factor worth keeping in mind for an NZNOG gathering? Oh, and I'll put in a vote for either Wellington or Hamilton, for purely self-centred reasons. 8-) -- don - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog