Core team meeting 2017-06-12, at https://bluejeans.com/6361797715/
Present
EkaterinaGerasimova (part, connection issues with Bluejeans)
Absent
Actions
- Kat to mail everyone who gets sponsorship and remind them to register
- Sam to book Thursday night hotel rooms for sponsored guests
- Sam to make news posts asking folk to register
Agenda
1. Travel sponsorship
2. Schedule
3. Press badges?
4. Sponsorship
5. Social events
Meeting notes
Travel sponsorship
When will sponsorship be fully confirmed/rejected for everyone?
Everyone who applied for sponsorship has now been notified with the exception of GSOC students. Kat is waiting for clarification from Google on the funding they can provide this year before we will know exactly how many GSOC students we can sponsor.
Do we transfer some Thursday rooms that we're selling with registration to the travel committee??
- So far Travel Ctte have 10 and need more like ~30
- We have 19 unsold from the block that we allocated for sale
- Only 1 block starting on Friday has been sold so far; so we might end up with a bunch of unsold rooms which would lose us significant money... (we have 19 rooms left to sell; ~£4000 to lose if they all go unsold vs. ~£1470 to book 30 hotel rooms on the Thursday night)
Kat has informed applicants of the issue and some are able to work around this for us.
For the others, we need to book a hotel. Sam will look at hotel rooms for 20 people on the Thursday night.
Schedule
Allan has done a provisional update to the schedule with some TBD slots for inviting talks that were rejected.
We didn't agree which talks to include at this point.
Kat prefers a 3rd track for including extra talks rather than changing the schedule. Cost would be ~£1000 extra for the extra room, we'd need a 3rd video camera too.
Hard to predict how the 3rd track would affect audiences.
There are fewer open talks in the new schedule (4 instead of 6), this shortens the AGM.
We turned Neil and Jonathan's talks into keynotes-- should we promote them as such? It's up to them in the first place. They probably don't need to be 1 hour long -- we can reduce.
AGM needs at least 2 hours. The birthday party aims to start at 7 so finishing at 18:00 would be ideal.
The new schedule finishes at 18:00 so we could add in a whole extra row of 30 minute talk slots. This would be plenty of room for inviting more speakers, but delays all the evening events and makes for 10 talk slots every day which is rather a lot.
Press badges
Someone contacted a special press@ email address asking about a press badge for GUADEC.
I don't think we don't usually do this but it's just a matter of printing a different badge -- we may as well do so.
Badges are usually printed in advance with blanks for the names, then printed again using the on-site printer.
Sponsorship
Discussion of party sponsorship. We are still short $4K USD for the costs of the party.
We need more sponsors in general -- Neil is on the case this week.
Evening events
Booking for these is ongoing, Javier and Lene are working on this.
https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2017/SocialEvents/ has details of what is booked.
These tie in with design considerations i.e. we usually print the details of the events on the badge.
Printing
The proposed GNOME beer needs to be ordered now if it's to happen -- Allan will chase this up as they have gone very quiet.
Water bottle printing should be organised soon. Sam will try to find someone to take on this task.
Next meeting
Next meeting will be Monday 19th June at 18:00 BST.