Cost: Not the $60 cost to register, the nearly $1000 in car,airfare, hotel and food. You cant fly anywhere without getting close to this.
A goal of LSH is to create face time... that is a difficult proposition with a state as big as Texas, but opening this as a world-wide event to support the DLA community is nearly-impossible without a big cost... hosting it in Florida or Vegas would not make it different.
I know there is hesitancy to record sessions and to open it up for live conferencing because of the face time goal -- but for the DLA classes, maybe there needs to be some flexibility.
I understand Steve, there is no "perfect" place. In fact Texas had cheaper airfares than many other towns. We had west coast and east coast people there. Texas is half between the coasts. It is just the price of going to an Expo.
If you are optimizing
"What is the best place to hold this and keep the average cost as low as possible?".
texas, probably comes out as #1. facility was first rate, show was managed great all for $60.
If you are trying to optimize
"How can we get more people to be able to participate?".
Maybe this includes allowing the sessions to be broadcast with something like BBB (You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login) . I think most presenters would be fine to share their work with a larger audience. Maybe have a fee ($10-30) for remote attendees for something to offset any technical costs.
I used BBB from my hotel room in Conroe, Texas (Wifi 54mbiit) and gave the Nutcracker presentation to the folks in Brisbane, Australia. That 2 hour presentation worked. The software is supposed to handle at least a couple hundred participants. It also allows for recording.
I would rather be there in person, but many people could have listened to most of these presentations (most were pdf files) and listen to the questions that are being asked. Some things (Solder lab), will just need you to be there in person.
just some ideas for next year. i had a blast at this one.