[Debconf-team] Minutes from the last meeting
Hi!
Sorry for the delay with the minutes, here's what we talked about last Monday.
* Local team status (Hotel/ISP)
We've been trying to negotiate better prices with the hotel, but our
efforts were mostly unsuccessful. We only got them to give us 10 beds
for free, provided that we bring 350 people to the conf, this means
only a 3% discount over the bedrooms-prices (We do get discounts over
the conf-room prices, but they don't affect the general budget too
much).
+ Rooms
One of the problems is that there aren't enough 3 or 4 people rooms.
So, one possibility for reducing room prices is to ask them to put 3
beds in 2 people rooms. This means that the rooms will be tight. Not
so much that you can't sleep in them for a week, but enough that you
won't be willing to spend more than sleeping time in them. Only
sponsored people would go in this tight rooms.
We don't know if we will need to do this or not, it depends on how
many sponsored people we have. But we are keeping it as an option, in
order to reduce our costs.
+ Food
Another of the big costs is the food. The hotel is currently giving us
the price of a a-la-carte restaurant when it's a fixed menu. It's not
a terribly expensive price, but it's more expensive than what we
originally expected (we have to acknowledge that the price for food in
Argentina has gone up, while the dollar has mostly stayed put, so
prices have gone up in dollars, and that's beyond the hotel's
control).
The option that we are considering is having the sponsored lunch in
the hotel but the sponsored dinner outside. This takes into account
that DebConf attendees usually like to "go out". So we thought that we
might arrange some vouchers with some near by restaurants and allow
attendees to choose where to spend them. This is just an idea that we
are considering, we have arranged with people living in MDQ to go and
talk with possible restaurants about it, but not much more than that.
+ ISP
About ISP, we got one big expensive budget from "Telefonica" which is
very large telephone/internet provider in Spain/Latin America. We want
to get them to sponsor the connection, and we are currently trying to
get the correct contact to speak to. This connection is done through
copper-wire bonding, and would provide a 10Mb/s commercial *dedicated*
*symmetric* connection (i.e. it's way more than what we asked for).
The other ISP is TelMex, we are still waiting for the budget to come,
but we fear it'll still be a lot of money. We want to get them
sponsored as well. We don't have the details about this, but we know
it would be a "radio link", i.e. a wireless link, but not Wi-Fi nor
Wi-Max, the commercial and more reliable technology. We don't want
this to be our main ISP though, we want it as backup.
* Amount of talk and BOF rooms
We are currently planning for: 1 talk room for ~ 250 people, 1 talk
room for ~ 100 people, 1 BOF room for ~ 40 people. This is a reduction
from last year, where there were 4 places, because the videoteam
complained that it was way too much to handle. There will be 3 places
for the video team to deal with: 3 streams for us. The hotel has
plenty of room for small ad-hoc meetings: the lobby, the
restaurant/bar, and several sofas distributed around the conf-rooms,
but those ad-hoc meetings would not be streamed nor recorded.
* Video team equipment to be brought from outside Argentina, and to be rented
The company that we have consulted only rents cameras with the
cameramans included. This does _not_ mean the renting is terribly
expensive, however, it means that we won't be able to control the
cameras ourselves. So, we need to be sure of what we want to rent and
what we want to bring from the outside.
The video team will have a meeting and discuss this, so that we can
arrange what we are going to rent.
* Assembly of the talks team and the sponsorship approval team
We are now at the point when we need to assemble these two teams. The
travel sponsorship should include people from local team, dpl, some
global team people and some from other areas around the world.
We decided that Ganneff will assemble the two lists with people that
volunteer and then send them to the mailing list so that we can
discuss here see if we go on with it.
* Registration report
By Monday we had 199 registered people. 9 as "Professionals", 1 as
"Corporate", the rest as "Individual". Only 2 weeks left before the
deadline. Ganneff volunteered to send a reminder mail to d-d-a and
dc-a. After the mail was sent, we've seen an increase in the numbers.
Currently we have 216 registrants, 11 as Prof, 1 as Corp, the rest as
Individual.
* Sponsors status
Invoices have been sent to HP, Canonical and Univention (their logos
should be added, in the Platinum, Silver, and Bronze categories
respectively). Tincho should be adding the logos to the website soon.
* Next meeting
Next meeting is to be held on Monday, April 21st, at 20:00 UTC.
Log: http://meetbot.debian.net/meetbot/debconf-team.log.20080317_2002.html
Notes: http://meetbot.debian.net/meetbot/debconf-team.20080317_2002.html
People Present:
1. marga
2. paravoid
3. ana
4. bdale
5. moray
6. h01ger
7. Ganneff
8. andreas
--
Besos,
Marga
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