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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 :))