New Idea 1:

How to convince presentors to use good visual aids
One of the particularly worrying problems of LISA conferences are the difficulties encountered by non-native English speakers. These difficulties arise (for the audience) when non-native speakers give oral presentations as well as when they have to follow talks given by native speakers (who often speak too quickly to be understood.)

Good visual aids (see SOC: Author notifications -- visual aids) can help significantly because they allow non-native speakers in the audience to follow the presentation. But how can presentors be encouraged (if not forced) to provide these aids?

One idea is to assign mentors to presentors. Mentors would guide and accompany the presentor through the process of creating a PowerPoint presentation. In case the presentor doesn't have ready access to technical facilities (PC, presentation software), s/he could even submit whatever shall appear on the slides to the mentor who then would convert the text into a simple ppt presentation. During the actual presentation, the mentor would operate the technical equipment (with which the presentor may be unfamiliar) and thus diminish the stress arising from a presentation in another than the mother tongue.

This partnership might be extended to the proceedings manuscript. With the help from a mentor, the quality of some papers could be improved immensely, and the load on the editors would be considerably lower.

New Idea 2:

Format of the proceedings
Because of budget restrictions, electronic-only proceedings, either online or offline on CDs etc., may be considered in future. While offline proceedings do not sound extremely tempting at first sight, they would diminish the prodcution costs immensely and yet make the proceedings available also to those colleagues with unstable or only occasional access to internet resources.