Core team meeting 2016-12-08, at https://meet.jit.si/guadec2017
Present
Actions
- Sam and Javier will apply for bank account
- Alberto will research on-site card payments
Alberto & Allan to push sponsorship brochure forward
- Sam to add support for accommodation booking to regcfp
Meeting summary
Agenda:
status of current tasks
UK bank account
- GNOME Foundation may not be allowed to have overseas bank account, so would prefer if this account isn't linked to them in any way because they'd need to consult with an accountant first.
- Alberto may not make sense as a signatory as he hasn't lived in UK for all of the last 3 years
We'll apply with Sam and Javier as the only trustees & signatories. It's possible to add Allan or Alberto later.
We can get a debit card each, and can share statements to ensure everyone is kept in the loop and things can function if both Sam & Javier become unavailable at some point.
Taking card payments at reception
Alberto suggests iZettle so we can take registration fees from people during the conference and allow them to pay by card. We need an Apple device.
Alberto can look into what we need and if there's a better solution.
Pay venue deposit
Payment was approved by the Board, invoice has been sent to board-list so this should be in progress.
Alberto asked if they will pay using TransferWise to save on bank fees; Allan says the Board doesn't have an account with them right now athough it is on their todo list.
Accommodation
Our proposal for university halls has been approved by the Board; no official news yet, but hopefully the signed contract will be sent over soon.
This means we need to be able to sell them at registration: https://github.com/puiterwijk/regcfp/issues/157 is the relevant issue.
Sponsorship brochure
No news on this front; Allan & Alberto will look at moving it forward.
Last year's can be used as a template, although that was rushed in some ways.
Should we include LAS in the brochure? Allan thinks Sri prefers to handle that separately.
Should we include GNOME Asia? We have done in the past, but we should check with this year's local team.
Alberto: It should include more content on *why* to sponsor GUADEC.
There's a problem with having 3 different organisation teams talking to the same companies about sponsoring GNOME events. This used to be solved by having an Executive Director who handled such things.
Website
Alberto will discuss this in person with Carla & Oliver next week.
They could perhaps help with the sponsorship brochure too, depending on how much free time they have.
We should aim to get a static page up as soon as possible.
Schedule
The schedule isn't always decided by the local team, although it could be.
Our current venue booking says we will be out of the venue by 18:00 on the Saturday and Sunday; we can ask to change this but probably not at the last minute.
Workshops
One sponsor mentioned to Alberto that they got a lot of value from workshops.
We've not thought about these yet. Doing them on day 0 seems problematic; but on day 4 (first BoF day) is practical.
Should we charge? Unclear; Sam has emailed Benjamin to see how much we made on them last year.
None of us 4 have bandwidth to organise the workshops, but we need to expand the team anyway so hopefully we can find someone who wants to take this on.
Announcement & promotion
The dates are now set (July 28th to August 2nd 2016). We should announce ASAP, but, probably wait until there's a website to point at.
Hopefully the basic website will be done in early January; let's aim to announce then although it depends on Carla & Oliver's free time.
Coordination of initial announcement:
- blogs (Planet GNOME)
- Twitter -- Alberto has access to @guadec
- Marketing Manchester
- University
MadLab if we can find the right people
We should also be reaching out to other local usergroups, hackspaces, co-working spaces etc.
Call for papers
Can begin as soon as the infrastructure is ready.
Use of Mozilla Persona
Work to replace the no-longer-working Persona system is in progress: https://github.com/puiterwijk/regcfp/issues/156
Patrick said in IRC that the replacement service for Persona will be ready this week.
Logo
Perhaps can be done as part of website work?
Each year we design based on iconic buildings of the ciy.
Here's a starting point: http://www.mdpag.org.uk/wp-content/themes/mdpag/images/accessible-manchester.jpg
Sponsors
Some progress but no major news. Lots of potential sponsors have said to contact them again in early 2017.
If/when we get a new Executive Director they would help with this task.
Some discussion of GNOME's position in the automotive space; recent events including Bosch's announcement last year, and the license change of Qt to GPL3 are relevant.
Alberto would like to ensure GUADEC is relevant to automotive companies where possible; but isn't able to talk to those companies in all cases.
Parties
Marketing Manchester have got quotes & reserved some venues around the city.
We will try and do some site visits towards the end of December. Alberto will not be able to make these.