What to see and do at Linuxcon

[Richard Royston]

As very much a newcomer to BCS I feel slightly diffident about commenting on
the Megameeting, but having been in computing for many years, and seen the
societies I join gradually (and not always so gradually) professionalize
themselves, all the while increasing the dues very significantly faster than
inflation, I view this trend in the BCS with very great alarm.  It has been
my experience (in the ACM, the British Computer Society, and the IEEE
Computer Society) that there is exactly zero increase in the level of
quality or quantity  of the services in which I am interested to accompany
these increases of several 100% in the fees.

If the Megameeting is run by professionals, I expect there will be a hefty
entrance fee, and I will almost certainly not attend.  I have run or helped
to run some meetings like this myself in the past, and I was far more
satisfied with the results than with the results of professionally run
meetings.

I just hope the Unix/Linux group doesn't go away, or get assigned to a
professional staff person to run, or somehow become prohibitively expensive
in some other way, but now I'm getting nervous!

Speaking as an amateur sociologist, my hunch is that societies are usually
started by people who are not yet enomously important in their profession,
who have the time and energy to organize and run meetings, but that as time
progresses those running the societies become relatively more eminent, and
thus busier, people, and so it becomes natural to offload more and more of the
work onto professional staff.

As the organization moves more into the "non-profit" mode it accepts grants
for all sorts of public service activities, and it justifies the grants by
demonstrating its own interest in those same activities through its own
expenditures on them, or at least by its absorption of some or all of the
overhead.  These expenditures, of course, are funded by the members' dues.
Hence the perpetual increases.  Newt, where are you when we need you?!

My observation of our group is that it is run by people who are actually
quite senior in their professions, but who still find time for the group.
This makes me feel very lucky, and grateful, and makes me wonder if it
might not still be possible to somehow head the BCS off before it reaches
the $100 subscription pass, with the almost certain accompanying decrease
in the interest of its activities to the members.