Andrew's blog

Wow, has it really been two weeks since the Capital Cabal had a bunch of the Ghosts of Conference Past in Wellington? It feels like it was, well, this weekend - and it's only Saturday morning!

One of the traditions of linux.conf.au that works really well is called the Ghosts Weekend. This is when the current organisers invite a selection of previous organisers somewhere for a weekend so they can perform a brain dump about things that went right for them, and in some cases, more importantly, what went wrong. They also go over the organisers plans to make sure that they're on track.

This all leads to a pretty intensive weekend!

We started on Friday with picking everyone up from the airport (my final pickup was 00:30, then we had to find some soda water for Ben & Leah's duty free Gin!). Saturday morning was a walk around all the venues, yes they're all within walking distance of one another. After a fantastic lunch at Coyote's we then hit a meeting room and got down to discussions.

If you're running a discussion like this, and most people in the room have laptops then I highly recommend using Gobby to take your notes. Everyone has a slightly different take on things, so note down slightly different things. Fantastic.

Our discussions continued over dinner on Saturday night which was at Fujiyama Teppanyaki, which is certainly a fun place to have dinner. Stewart did an amazing job at dodging the bit of cooked egg that one of the chefs flung his way!

Sunday was back in the meeting room for continuing discussions. Followed by a few well earned beers and dinner at Wellington Brewery Bar. nom, nom, nom.

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend and I'd like thank the Ghosts who attended, give apologies to the Ghosts we couldn't invite and give a huge thank you to Susanne for organising a fantastic weekend that went incredibly smoothly!