Core team meeting 2017-01-16, at https://meet.jit.si/guadec2017

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Meeting summary

Agenda:

Website & annoucement

The venue is booked & the dates are now fixed: 28th July to 2nd August 2017.

We want to announce ASAP but are waiting to have a basic website ready first. Carla Quintana is working on this but we don't know her progress.

The 2017.guadec.org Wordpress instance is already up.

  • We'll wait til next Monday (23rd January) and if it's not ready, set up a very basic website on the Wordpress instance ourselves
    • We need access to the Wordpress; we can contact Oliver about this as he already has access.

    • We need info on travel & accommodation; Sam can write drafts this week and get them reviewed on guadec-list

Registration

We want registration to be open as soon as possible.

Sam has looked at regcfp and implemented accommodation bookings: https://github.com/puiterwijk/regcfp/pull/167

There is a test instance set up for 2017 running: http://test-guadec2017-regcfp.herokuapp.com/

Still various tasks before it's ready:

* finalize design & wording * set up new identity system to replace Mozilla Persona * deploy to GNOME infra * configure to use Foundation's PayPal account

Sam will talk to Patrick Uiterwijk about getting this set up.

Meetings going forwards

Extra volunteers

We are a small team right now and there local people keen to join in, but what tasks do we have for them right now?

We will need the most help around July.

Current tasks:

* promotion, including local user groups & universities * social event organisation

We can coordinate extra volunteers on guadec-list rather than trying to get everyone to join regular meetings.

Meetings

We should meet more regularly from now on; we'll try Mondays 16:00-17:00.

IRC or jit.si?

  • jit.si higher bandwidth
  • IRC meetings allow people to lurk and help out
  • IRC meetings are quicker when there's not much to discuss, but can become super long if not structured

We'll try IRC for the next couple of weeks, with a fixed agenda and 'meetbot' logging, and we'll decide from there.

Payments for venue & accommodation

These should have been paid, but haven't received confirmation either from the Foundation or from the University.

  • Sam will check with Kate at MMU if it's been received

Sponsorship brochure

We like what Meg has done.

It could have more work from a graphic design aspect. But we shouldn't block on this.

The graphic "GNOME's influence in the Linux ecosystem" on page 3 is good but perhaps needs putting in context with an intro paragraph.

  • Allan will lead any 'polishing' work for the brochure

The logo is urgent, we need it for the website.

Jakob made a start but needs more work to reflect the city.

We could use the Manchester "worker bee" logo instead of a skyline? But lots of GUADEC stuff is layed out with a city skyline in mind, so this would have a big knock-on effect.

  • Allan will finish off the logo design.

Second deposit for accommodation

This is due at the end of January (quite soon after the 1st payment, but the 1st payment was delayed by 3 or 4 months in the end).

After this we'll have paid around 80% of the accommodation hire costs.

Collecting items at FOSDEM

  • Sam is going to attend FOSDEM and organise collection of items.

Lots of Codethink staff are going from Manchester but mostly by plane, which makes it hard to carry banners etc.

There are some Cambridge folk going who might be getting the train, collecting stuff from there later on isn't difficult.

Sponsors

So far we have 1 platinum sponsor confirmed.

Alberto has been following up with potential sponsors, but due to the Christmas holidays there isn't much to report.

If we gain a new executive director they can take over some of this work.

  • Alberto will continue contacting sponsors, including regulars

Keynotes

We need to start contacting potential keynote speakers.

What are the goals with having keynote speakers?

  • Bring different perspectives to the community
  • Attract sponsors and attendees by having big names giving talks, e.g. Richard Stallman's keynote in 2009
  • Special cases for "must see" talks that, were they scheduled normally, would leave someone else on the other track talking to an empty room

We pay travel and accommodation costs for keynote speakers, but not clear if we would pay speaking fees.

Some years we've rushed with the keynotes and they've not gained us much.

Plan: to aim high, and consider dropping keynote slots if we're not able to get speakers that we're excited about.

VIPs

It's the 20th anniversary of GNOME; we could invite some "emeritus" contributors to the party.

  • We need to set a date for the party then
  • Javier will look at choosing a venue the birthday party (two options, depending on whether we find a sponsor for it)

There are some veteran free software folk in the UK who we could perhaps invite as VIPs.

Next meeting

Next meeting will be in #guadec at 16:00 UTC on Monday 24th January.

GUADEC/2017/Meetings/20170116 (last edited 2017-01-17 17:13:59 by SamThursfield)