Hi everyone,
In BoF session yesterday at FUDCon Pune, we discussed and agreed some main stuffs:
In general, the PP team is not ready enough, they need to check and change more things in their bid [1] before getting back for approval. I propose the deadline to get back to this for approval is a month. After that, we need to decide whether approving the bid or making other call for bidding.
We do hope to have another awesome FUDCon next year.
In details, there are some issues need to be addressed:
* The first problem is event date. It should not hold in October because of conflict with FUDCon LATAM date. That conflict could lead community members (especially community leaders) have to choice which event they should attend. Beside that, since FUDCon is a premier event and it needs a lot of money (mostly from Red Hat) so it is harder to arrange sponsoring.
We need to check this with Red Hat (the main sponsor). Another way is to arrange with LATAM to change their data. It may work because there is much time (from now on) to prepare and also (maybe) LATAM also wants to have a change to refresh (!?)
* The other problem is cash. It is a big problem with Phnom Penh team because everything needs to be paid in advance by the organizing team and then got reimbursement from OSAS in the current policy. Therefore, organizing team must prepare for some cash sources to cover about $5,000-10,000 USD (depending on which stuffs could be paid by credit card online)
Beside that, PayPal does not accept receiving money in Cambodia so it is more difficult to receive the reimbursement.
The solution proposed/agreed during the session is to ask OSAS if cash could be provided in advance for organizing the event. Organizing team (with support from gnokii) would be in charge of contact to OSAS for this.
Other solutions could be proposed, just make sure to solve the issue. E.g. one of it is call for participants to bring some cash along. It was used once to cover expenses during FAD Phnom Penh last year.
* Last but not least, there is a lack of human resources. There are 4 people in organizing team but not all of them are active enough to involve into preparation process. That one of reasons why they propose to organize FUDCon during BarCamp Phnom Penh. But mixing to events here also leads more problem so during the sessions there are some ideas to organize FUDCon just before or after BarCamp.
Some other comments/ideas:
Cambodian team should organize more *smaller* events for community building and getting more experience about tho to organize an event, how the reimbursement process works, etc.
Thank you for attending the session. Please correct me if I missed something.
Rgds, Tuan
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Bid_for_PhnomPenh_2016