[SAGE] Speakers?

[Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>]

Folks,

At our January meeting, CACTUS selected their new set of officers for 
this next year, and I've been drafted in as the Program Chair.

Now, I've been looking for potential speakers to come to a future 
CACTUS meeting and give a talk on a subject, and of course one of the 
first things that occurred to me was to take a look at the SAGE 
Speakers Bureau.  I know that CACTUS is a USENIX affiliate 
organization as opposed to SAGE, but many of the people there are 
sysadmins and I figured there'd at least be a lot of overlap.


Now, looking at the Speakers Bureau page (sorted by topic) at 
<http://www.sage.org/cgi-bin/speakers/speakers.cgi?action=bytopic>, a 
couple of things strike me.

One is that this page doesn't tell me where the individual speakers 
are located.  I don't know about you, but I imagine most people 
aren't going to be interested to travel to a local group like CACTUS 
to give a talk, unless they are already living pretty close by.  I 
can deal with that, because it turns out that there are a relatively 
few topics that I think would be of interest to CACTUS members, and a 
relatively few number of speakers that would be involved.  Even going 
through every name listed at 
<http://www.sage.org/cgi-bin/speakers/speakers.cgi?action=byspeaker> 
would be do-able.  But, my job would be made a easier if I could 
avoid these steps.

Another thing is that there is no indication on this page as to who 
has a set minimum requirement for compensation, and who has either 
none or would at least be willing to consider a relatively nominal 
fee to come talk to a local group.  Certainly, I would be willing to 
do that for any group within a decent driving distance of where I 
live in Austin, and I'd like to update my speakers bureau entry to 
reflect that.  But it's hard to see who else might feel the same way.


Now, broadening this question a bit, does anyone know of any similar 
resources that might be useful for someone trying to put together 
potential topics of interest for future meetings of this kind of 
local group?

Thanks!

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>, CACTUS Program Chair
CACTUS - Capital Area Central Texas Unix Society <http://www.cactus.org/>

LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>