On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 12:29:49PM -0400, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 10:17:17AM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 11:11:20AM +0200, Yaakov Nemoy wrote:
2010/4/7 Robyn Bergeron robyn.bergeron@gmail.com:
Sorry for the cross-post - not sure which list is more appropriate :)
So - I'm looking into doing a bid for the ever-so-awesome city of Tempe, Arizona (ASU, baby!!).
Before I start calling around - I figured that there are probably a few pieces of information that might be useful to have. They aren't really called out on any of the fudcon bid / sop pages, so it might be helpful to answer them and then add the info to the wiki pages.
#1: How many days? From what I can see - it looks like 3 full days, at least in Toronto for a North America FUDCon. Is this flexible ("we'll throw in conference rooms if everyone stays an extra day,")? A guideline? Etc?
So far, every fudcon i've been to has been at least three days long.
We discussed the question of FUDCon length at the Events FAD. It was suggested that we make the next North American FUDCon four days long, with two days of sessions and two days of hacking. I do wonder a bit about how the burnout factor might increase -- but that factor could be *lower* for a four-day event, because we'll have more time available in general. It does, however, raise the overall cost of the event for an attendee (extra hotel room night, which might be a total of ~$50 per person at double occupancy).
Note that the attendees of the hackfest days might be a subset of the attendees for the session days. If you're looking at a hotel that wants to guarantee number of rooms or, for that matter, different number of conferrence rooms for the different days.
For that matter, to me the most successful FUDCon hackfest was in Raleigh at the State Club -- For hackfest we had a single room for everyone and a huge number of square tables that we could rearrange as group size grew and shrank. We also had excellent wireless connectivity (compared to other hackfests). The single room, table arrangements, and networking allowed us to quickly collaborate with other people that we needed input from.
This room was not a good venue for the FUDCon session days, which need more isolation from each other for speakers to hold the attention of their audiences -- but we moved to the Red Hat offices for that which were suited for that.
Excellent points all. I wouldn't be opposed to a Raleigh bid for a FUDCon, but I sure would like to see an exciting new location somewhere west... :-)
Wifi is a tough problem to solve when money is most definitely an object. With a longer lead time and more people involved in planning, maybe we could figure out some clever infrastructure solutions, even if they require that we pay some random $1K+ bill for a truly open, high-speed connection to cover the whole event.
I know there are local vendors that can probably handle such a need. May just be a matter of the local bid team finding them, and cutting a good deal.