In message <20060327104307.GA30241(a)citylink.co.nz>, Simon Blake writes:

4) should we have a sysadmin stream?

As the person who suggested this (al beit with the prompting of Simon Lyall who was hunting for ligntning talks!), I should say that the motivation is more that there is a small, but growing, group of people interested in reviving SAGE-NZ, who are looking for a conference venue. There were quite a few New Zealanders at the System Administrators miniconf at Linux.Conf.Au in Dunedin in January: http://sysadmin.miniconf.org/program.html Many of them seemed interested in doing it again. But the next Linux.Conf.Au is in Sydney, and so it's likely (based on past experience) that not many of them will make the trip. Since SAGE-NZ isn't really built up enough to run its own independent conference the obvious solution is to find some appropriate existing conference and run something in conjunction with that. NZNOG is an obvious one because there's a reasonable overlap between those that expressed an interest in "doing it again" and NZNOG attendees already. And indeed between what a "system administrator" and a "network administrator" does. If NZNOG is not interested (or stronger, unwilling) to act as host to such a miniconf then that's obviously understandable. But if it is willing to act as host, then I think it'd be best seen as helping SAGE-NZ out, perhaps getting a few more people to help organise things, giving NZNOG attendees an option to learn more about the application layer, and maybe coincidentally helping a few more people justify attending (if only to themselves). After some discussion with Simon Lyall, et al, I suspect the best approach would be a one-day miniconf aligned with the NZNOG tutorial day. That kind of miniconf approach has worked very well for Linux.Conf.Au (which now has half a dozen of them regularly on the days immediately prior to the main conference) and doesn't seem to noticably distract people from the main conference. But of course if y'all really hate the idea, then SAGE-NZ will need to figure something else out. Ewen