My name is John Miller and I will be chairing the volunteer organising committee this year. Co chairing will be Michael Capps who many of you already know from WWW 6. I am an Audio Visual technician from Southern Cross University, one of the WWW 7 consortium members. I was a volunteer this year at Santa Clara and I am looking forward to working with many of you again, as well as those who will be newcomers to WWW conference volunteering. 

Mark Williams from U.Q. will be running the network building and administration. Volunteers from WWW 6 may remember Mark as one of the 4 Australian volunteers working there. The network he will be building for the conference and the associated PC show will be immense. Add to this our mission to create a world record Internet cafe attempt - potentially 1,000 machines online simultaneously and you can see a lot of interesting challenges ahead for all of us. Take a look at the picture of BCEC off the location link, we will be occupying the entire complex, one of the only events to ever do this. This truly is a brilliant location for our conference and I promise all participants an exciting and fulfilling time here. 

As you already know the conference will be held at the Brisbane Conference and Exhibition Center, to be known from now as BCEC. The Local Organising Committee have been hard at work building what we hope will be the most exciting web event to occur in 1998. The event is shaping up to be the biggest WWW Conference ever with an amalgamation of a major PC Exhibition and a world record Internet Cafe attempt. Big doesn’t automatically mean better, it will be up to the contributions of those involved in making it all work that will make it a truly memorable event. Success of the conference will depend greatly upon the invaluable contribution made by Volunteers. 

If you haven’t volunteered for a conference before and are contemplating getting involved, here’s the deal -The Volunteer Organising Committee is a sub committee of the Local Organising Committee, set up by the WWW7 Consortium. We offer a limited number of positions for volunteers to attend the conference with a full registration, accommodation and meals provided in exchange for your time, expertise and enthusiasm as conference workers. The committee exists primarily to give students who wish to attend the conference the opportunity to earn a registration and accommodation that they otherwise could not afford. While students are given priority, we are open to accepting people from within the industry who demonstrate the desire to attend but may not otherwise be able to without assistance from the volunteer organisation. We acknowledge that attending a conference in Australia will be harder for some valuable people to get here so we are widening the scope of potential volunteers. 

Look around our Web site for all the details on the conference itself, the venue and general info and check back here for regular newsletters and updates. There is much to do between now and April, I can tell you now about the volunteer arrangements that are already in place. 

Accommodation - will be at the University of Queensland campus. The university will be in recess at the time of conference and they are making vacant student facilities available to house our volunteers. At this stage we are offering accom. For a week, Saturday to Saturday. This will be standard student facilities, clean and comfortable and yes, you will all have your own bed in your own room. 

Transport- U.Q. , like BCEC is built on the banks of the Brisbane River, about 5 miles apart. All accommodated volunteers will be issued a weekly River Cat pass which will let them travel to and from the conference every day. There are also buses, taxis etc. but the river is the quickest. The cat pulls up right at the door of the BCEC. They run every half hour. This is the most efficient form of transport, also the most pleasant. Local volunteers who have to commute to BCEC will be subsidised for using the Brisbane Transit system of their choice. BCEC is right in the middle of the city of Brisbane, Public Transport to the center is readily available. 

Meals - Breakfast is included with the accommodation and will be available every morning at U.Q. Lunch, Morning and Afternoon tea will be provided at the conference the same as the other fully registered delegates. At this stage we do not propose supplying dinner. It will be near impossible to co ordinate meals specifically for volunteers in the evenings due to varying rosters etc. Volunteers will be given a ticket to participate in the distributed dinner planned for the Wednesday night. 

Registration- Volunteers receive a full conference registration and all the goodies that come with it. This will allow you to attend any conference events, subject of course to your work roster. I have already been contacted by some people who will have a full registration already and wish to provide work for accommodation only. We should be able to work something out as the rosters become clearer, there will definitely be times when we require more than what we allocate for a full week of work. 

Management - All administrative functions for the conference will be handled by Conventions Queensland, a commercial conference management company who have been contracted to handle most of the day to day organisational work. They will be handling a lot of the tasks that volunteers have done in the past, including registration, security, information, translating etc. This should be good news to a lot of the skilled volunteers who weren’t happy about having to perform some of these tasks in the past. The bad news is that this forces the number of volunteers required down. On the up side, we are doing Networking and AV ourselves which not only helps keep the numbers required up, demands a high level of skilled participation. 

Social Events - We will organise a social committee for Volunteer activities as the event draws closer at this stage I can tell you that Brisbane offers all that you would expect of a large city in the way of restaurants, theatre, cinema etc. There’s a casino 5 minutes walk away. South East Queensland in April is still pretty warm and there is a great swimming lake near the venue. Almost all of Australia’s major theme parks are close by including Sea World and Warner Bros. Movie World. 1 hour south is the Gold Coast, with some of the best surf beaches in the world. I will be organising some surf trips for anyone interested before and after the conference. 

So ends Newsletter #1. Check this site regularly for updates. The schedule at the moment is to post a Newsletter every month from now on. I plan to have the next one and the Online registration form up immediately after the next LOC meeting, so check back here about December 10. The first batch of offers will go out early January. 

Looking forward to seeing you in Brisbane, April 1998 

John Miller 
Chair, Volunteer Organising Committee