If anyone has worked for a non-profit organization, you probably already know that you have to deal with a lot of factors when it comes to putting on events. SHARE is no different and with this crap we have all faced for over a year and half, it has made it so much worse.
There was a strong desire to get SHARE back to in-person. There was also a tremendous amount of *risk* SHARE will be facing doing this with so many unknowns; will companies let people travel, will people _want_ to travel, will the country, state, city, hotel shut down AGAIN, etc etc. It isn't easy at all to plan and decide all of it - and if you think it is easy, then I have a job for you! We had to balance the risk factors with the size and content of the event. We could not just jump back into "business as usual" with 500+ sessions over the course of 5+ days. The risk was off the charts and would have been unrealistic to think everyone is going to be there (1200+ people). We decided to shorten the week and limit the tracks to the highest attended topics. We ALL are trying our very best to present an event that will be enticing and timely to most of our attendees. That said, there are certainly some groups that didn't specifically make it into the event, LVM being one of them. For what it is worth, the Program Manager of LVM and myself are both highly involved with LVM because not only is the topic highly cost-effective for organizations but pretty darn cool too. We didn't like the idea, but it was really hard to argue based on all the factors we had to consider. LVM, CICS, IMS and many others are not part of the live event, but SHARE is and will provide other ways those groups can stay active and present material through WebEx seminars or other virtual offerings. And yes, the topics for the in-person event such as Security could include any of those topics, but would a VM Sysprog (for instance) attend because there are one or two sessions on VM or Linux security? Not likely. Would the topics be interesting for a Security professional in the mainframe space? YES. It's all juggling and tough decisions. So far, as long as the winds don't change for the worse, Columbus in August 2022 is on track to be a full conference. -- *James Vincent* -- Your humble SHARE rep ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
