Core team meeting 2016-10-18, at https://meet.jit.si/guadec2017
Present
Actions
- Allan will find out the current status of the 2017 sponsorship brochure
- Allan will check with the Foundation if the large up front payment needed for the University halls would be even possible.
- Allan will check out Taiga, and if it doesn't fit the bill, create a skeleton Wiki page for us to use as a task tracker.
Alberto will start discussions with foundation-list and/or Kat about communication between organisers & papers committee
Meeting summary
Sponsorship
Alberto has contacted 7 or 8 potential sponsors.
The sponsorship brochure needs to be completed soon as some companies will already be fixing the revelant budgets for next year.
Budgets for social events:
- we received some info from Marketing Manchester on packages we could have; these are quite expensive so would depend on sponsorship
- a more DIY event is also possible, we should come up with a couple of costed proposals for these
List of sponsorship perks:
- we should be clear about where the sponsor's logos will appear at the conference
There are many other things that can be sponsored: the football game, snacks, tea & coffee, ...
The brochure needs to cover GUADEC, GNOME ASIA and LAS GNOME.
We would like the brochure to emphasize the low & middle level software that has been developed around GNOME: D-Bus, HAL, Tracker, inotify, GStreamer, Mono, Wayland, etc; we think this will help attract a larger and more diverse set of groups to get involved in GNOME and sponsor our conferences.
* Allan will find out the current status of the 2017 brochure
Conference Content
When reaching out to sponsors we must talk about how the conference is useful to them, and maybe include stuff in their field. For example our technology is increasingly widely used in the automotive industry, having a panel session with engineers from these automotive companies discussing their needs would be useful to them.
These discussions are complicated by the disconnect between the team who recruit sponsors and the papers committee, who decide on the content of the main days.
There are advantages to having some separation here, but we think we need to increase communication; if one member of the organizing team was also on the papers team we could make sure that we make more informed decisions about content, without significantly adding bais to the papers committee.
It's not really clear who decides about panel sessions in the schedule.
* Alberto will start discussions with foundation-list and/or Kat about communications between organisers & papers committee
Accommodation & Venue booking
The University are taking longer than expected to draw up contracts but they should be ready by end of October.
Marketing Manchester have got a quote from The Jury's Inn, a hotel in the city centre that's 15 minutes walk from the venue. The quote is £84 to £124 per room per night for a double occupancy room. The £124 rate is only Saturday.
So a 3 night (Friday to Sunday) stay would cost £146 per person based on 2 people sharing a room. A 6 night stay would cost £272 per person.
The University halls would cost £126 per person for a 3 night stay, or £252 per person for a 6 night stay.
The terms of the hotel are pretty flexible, although we'd still need to push people to register ~2 months in advance of the conference:
Cancellation is 35 days prior to arrival Payment due 35 days prior to arrival Rooming List due 14 days prior to arrival
We may be able to set up a payment gateway such that the money goes straight to the hotel.
Sharing a room is tricky if you don't know anyone; previous editions have had a 'buddy up' page on the wiki to help with that.
The University terms will probably require us to pay 40% in November and the remaining 60% by March; this requires a lot of upfront cash from the Foundation, which we then need to handle repaying as people book the rooms at registration.
We would need to estimate the booking pretty carefully, including how many people want to stay 2 nights, how many for 3 nights, how many want 2 nights but starting on the Saturday, how many for 5 nights, how many 6 nights -- difficult! We could do block bookings of 3 nights or 6 nights, but this discourages people from staying in the halls if they want a different booking. Many people only stay for 5 nights; but we don't want to discourage people from staying 6 nights.
We will wait til we receive the actual contracts from the University to decide a final option.
* Allan will check with the Foundation if the large up front payment needed for the University halls would be even possible.
Management tool
We have a Trello instance right now: https://trello.com/b/Tq0LtoCy/guadec-2017
It's private, when most of the content should actually be public, and some of us don't find Trello useful.
We could switch to another tool like Taiga (http://taiga.io); or just a Wiki page that tracks our tasks.
* Allan will check out Taiga, and if it doesn't fit the bill, create a skeleton Wiki page for us to use as a task tracker.
Team
We need to begin involvement of other local and internet volunteers at some point. Once the venue & accomodation is booked we can get started with everything else. The bulk of work for the local team will be later on from March 2017 onwards.