On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Jun 7, 2016, at 10:53 PM, Mike Giarlo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >
> > Can you say more about what you expect "the emotional and bureaucratic
> expense" to be?
>
> Bureaucratic and emotional expenses include yet more committees and
> politics. Things will happen increasingly slowly. Our community will be
> less nimble and somewhat governed by outside forces. We will end up with
> presidents, vice-presidents, secretaries, etc. Increasingly there will be
> “inside” and “outside”. The inside will make decisions and the outside
> won’t understand and feel left out. That is what happens when formalization
> take place.
>

So, to be clear: you think this isn't already happening? You think* as it
stands, nobody is baffled by the operations of Code4Lib, and nobody feels
like outsiders, not knowing how decisions are made?*

*Would everyone else agree with that statement? *Am I the only one here who
has felt like a baffled outsider to Code4Lib--who feels that way pretty
regularly, in fact?

If I'm alone in that, maybe I'll change my mind on the value of structure
to [potentially!] make things clearer to newcomers.


> The regional conferences are good things. I call them franchises. The
> annual meeting does not have to be a big deal, and the smaller it is, the
> less financial risk there will be. Somebody will always come forward. It
> will just happen.
>

 I was the person who coalesced the Lessons Learned wiki pages from 2013-15
into a single page in the leadup to the 2016 conference. So I can tell you,
with great confidence, that the annual meeting DOES have to be a big deal.
It is impossible for it not to be, with so many people showing up every
year, all of them with different needs that we have decided, as a
community, that we will do our best to meet. Just *feeding* that many
people for one day, without leaving anyone out (or, worse, accidentally
poisoning someone), is a HUGE undertaking. "Just" managing the hotel block
and fighting with the hotel over A/V and other fees and trying to prevent
the host organization from going broke is a HUGE job.

I've served as "just" the technology chair for a 400 person conference that
did *not* do live video streams with captioning. It was a TREMENDOUS job.
It took SO much work, even with notes from the previous tech chair and with
a really involved conference chair who went to every meeting I went to.
(And I got to be part of negotiations with the hotel, so I have some
understanding of how big a job that last line from the previous paragraph
is.)

And people who have served as our chairs are on here, *telling us*: It's a
really big job. It *already is a big deal*.

- Coral
(not Carol :))