> When we poll attendees in our Linux and z/VM sessions, 90% of them are
MVS
> folks that have been told they're going to be doing z/VM and Linux.  I
> think moving that content into a separate conference would result in
> getting very little to no attendees, since their management won't pay
to
> send them two places.

It is interesting that SHARE/GUIDE Europe seems to do very well with
targeted "sub-conferences" for specific topics. The physical proximity
of the European community may have a lot to do with that (as well as the
collocation with the IBM z/Expos in Europe), but I would suspect that it
might be a very interesting thing to try out for the VM and Linux
content at SHARE US. 

What I also observe is that it's a lot easier to get approval in most
organizations for conference attendance IFF the conference is tightly
focused on a specific topic. Sending someone to a general-purpose
conference is hard to justify because it doesn't "accomplish" something
trivially evaluatable as relevant to a current project. It may
accomplish the same task, but unless it has a specific word in the
title, the finance weenies don't want to pay for it. 

> I don't see that
> outnumbering the MVS attendance, so I think trying to draw them away
from
> other UNIX/Linux conferences would be a bad move.

I think that withdrawing the VM and Linux content from SHARE and
appending it to LISA would buy a lot more. LISA already has a
large-systems orientation, and they're really hot for virtualization and
big-system content (and we have more experience doing both than any
other virtualization solution). They also aren't hostile to experimental
content. It might be a good match -- and having the "we have to build
the bigger enterprise, so let's all get along" attitude would be
positive for both groups. LISA already attracts the mainstream IT crowd,
so I think that might generate the synergy that we want. 

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