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?
#2: Approximate number of people?
#3: Number of conference rooms. I haven't been to a FUDCon (yet - yet!) so - I'm not really sure here. One or two large rooms (capacity #???) and... smaller rooms?
#4: if it is a venue whose conference room policy is "all lunches / food has to be provided by us" - is that an automatic thumbs down? Or do we plan a two hour lunch offsite (hopefully not far away)?
That's all (for now) :)
Cheers,
-robyn
On 4/5/10, Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
The Fedora Project holds a number of global FUDCon events each year. Typically the Community Architecture team's budget supports one of these large events each Red Hat fiscal quarter (with the fiscal year starting on March 1). This year we have the Latin American event, FUDCon Santiago[1] in Chile, in Q2; the event for EMEA, FUDCon Zurich in Switzerland, in Q3; and a North American FUDCon event in Q4.
In each case, typically the event will happen sometime in the first two months of the quarter, so that we can ensure all bills are paid by Red Hat's financial deadlines. That deadline usually comes a couple weeks before the end of quarter, so the first two months are the ideal time to actually stage an event. So the North American FUDCon event will happen in either December 2010 or January 2011. The bidders will work with the Community Architecture team to resolve the exact timing.
In the past we've often heard from community members that they'd love to have an event in a warmer clime during the chilly winter months. We couldn't agree more, and now we have a way to empower our community to make that happen. FUDCon Honolulu? Maybe not, but we're open to other possibilities! We want to find a place for the next North American event that includes:
Reasonable travel, room and board costs
Availability of inexpensive or free event space
A little warmer than Boston (we hope!)
Active FOSS/other interested communities that might like to attend
Consideration of academic schedules for students who want to attend
Consideration of holidays for people in North America
One or more organizing Fedora community members with the time and energy to help prepare
We now have a bid process[3] that lets interested community members propose FUDCon in their region, or even backyard. Nothing Olympic style -- simply a way for excited Fedora folks in the locale to help secure event space, lodging, and other logistical details. We've already kicked this process off for FUDCon Zurich 2010, and are looking to start this cycle for North America as well. In the summer, after FUDCon Santiago concludes, we will kick the same process off for Latin America again for a 2011 conference.
So here's what you need to do to get the ball rolling:
Join the fudcon-planning list[4] and let us know you want to bid.
Make a wiki page called [[FUDCon:Bid_for_<Your_Town>_2011]], with the information outlined on the bid process[3] page.
The bid process will be open for a period of approximately 3 weeks. At that point the FPL and Community Architecture teams, as major stakeholders in the event, will go through the bids and make a decision on where we'll locate FUDCon North America.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Santiago_2010 [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Zurich_2010 [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon_bid_process [4] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fudcon-planning
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFLulbCrNvJN70RNxcRAiC/AKCmdh7kpohjQcIHHp9AsHVmD/E4QACgsH/r NAh1llrQ4eK4FqxJhwLEP4k= =dLt+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ fudcon-planning mailing list fudcon-planning@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fudcon-planning
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.
#2: Approximate number of people?
Check previous fudcons, but estimate around 200+
#3: Number of conference rooms. I haven't been to a FUDCon (yet - yet!) so - I'm not really sure here. One or two large rooms (capacity #???) and... smaller rooms?
We need at least one room / one room + overflow room that can hold everyone. We do this to get thing going in the morning and at the closing. I've never seen many rooms fully and tightly packed during any presentation though, with some small exceptions, (or large ones). Having an array of rooms from 20p to 60p along with that big one should do the trick.
#4: if it is a venue whose conference room policy is "all lunches / food has to be provided by us" - is that an automatic thumbs down? Or do we plan a two hour lunch offsite (hopefully not far away)?
Usually conference centers who do this are looking to recoup some kind of loss. If they absolutely won't accept any other option, then they are just bad negotiators. On the other hand, they are also probably keeping kitchen staff on hand that they have to pay, and sometimes they are even bound by unions. If they insist on being a vendor for food, just play hardball and make sure they provide certain guarantees, and hold them to their word. They essentially deny you the right to pick your own vendor and make the best choice, so you have to let them know you see things this way and expect only top quality from them.
Just my two cents.
-Yaakov
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).
#2: Approximate number of people?
Check previous fudcons, but estimate around 200+
+1. An estimate of 200 should do.
#3: Number of conference rooms. I haven't been to a FUDCon (yet - yet!) so - I'm not really sure here. One or two large rooms (capacity #???) and... smaller rooms?
We need at least one room / one room + overflow room that can hold everyone. We do this to get thing going in the morning and at the closing. I've never seen many rooms fully and tightly packed during any presentation though, with some small exceptions, (or large ones). Having an array of rooms from 20p to 60p along with that big one should do the trick.
+1.
#4: if it is a venue whose conference room policy is "all lunches / food has to be provided by us" - is that an automatic thumbs down? Or do we plan a two hour lunch offsite (hopefully not far away)?
Usually conference centers who do this are looking to recoup some kind of loss. If they absolutely won't accept any other option, then they are just bad negotiators. On the other hand, they are also probably keeping kitchen staff on hand that they have to pay, and sometimes they are even bound by unions. If they insist on being a vendor for food, just play hardball and make sure they provide certain guarantees, and hold them to their word. They essentially deny you the right to pick your own vendor and make the best choice, so you have to let them know you see things this way and expect only top quality from them.
Just my two cents.
Some additional ways I might suggest to negotiate here:
* Agree to something like daily catered coffee/tea/drinks in exchange for a more competitive hotel room discount. (I would consider carefully whether a venue requiring contracted food is providing a great deal on rooms.)
* Ask for the venue to provide complimentary nightly snacks at a hack suite. They're providing a hack suite, right? Or alternately, 24-hour access to the conference areas?
Something I would *highly* recommend, since it's been a problem many times in the past: Let the hotel know their wireless is not sufficient for 200 people, no matter how they might protest ("Oh, it's always worked for guests.") We will eat your wifi, guaranteed. So you'll want to secure in writing a promise that they will contract with someone to provide suitable wifi if the conference is going to be at a hotel and not a university (where they generally do better in this regard).
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.
-Toshio
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.
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 04:20:28PM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
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.
Note: If we're talking about being serious about making sure that our wifi needs are covered, I'd definitely say talk to nirik and his colleague jafo. Jafo has done the wifi for pycon the years I went there (thousands of attendees). One year, pycon hired an outside vendor to handle the wifi but by the end of the conference, jafo had once again taken over because the vendor couldn't provide reliable service. I had a chance to talk to jafo about what he's done this year and it's apparent that he's got a better practical understanding of setting up wifi for a huge number of people than anyone else we're likely to talk to.
I know Tummy isn't local unless we end up in Colorado but perhaps we could hire them to manage our wifi needs or give training on setting up wifi networks for large conventions.
-Toshio
On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 12:34:12AM -0400, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 04:20:28PM -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
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.
Note: If we're talking about being serious about making sure that our wifi needs are covered, I'd definitely say talk to nirik and his colleague jafo. Jafo has done the wifi for pycon the years I went there (thousands of attendees). One year, pycon hired an outside vendor to handle the wifi but by the end of the conference, jafo had once again taken over because the vendor couldn't provide reliable service. I had a chance to talk to jafo about what he's done this year and it's apparent that he's got a better practical understanding of setting up wifi for a huge number of people than anyone else we're likely to talk to.
I know Tummy isn't local unless we end up in Colorado but perhaps we could hire them to manage our wifi needs or give training on setting up wifi networks for large conventions.
Great tip, Toshio, thanks!
Kevin, I don't want to put you on the spot to post numbers here. Maybe you can email me privately to let me know what kind of costs we'd be looking at to get someone to manage wifi for a ~200-person FUDCon conference.
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com 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).
Ok last year we broke how FUDcon worked I think because we had a ton of great ideas and not enough time to show them off. How about the following:
Halfday talks Halfday hacks.
or make it plainly obvious that people could do talks on the last days too (some people didn't think they could and others didn't want talks to intefere with the real reason they had come to the fudcon :)).
#2: Approximate number of people?
Check previous fudcons, but estimate around 200+
+1. An estimate of 200 should do.
It also depends on how much the local university system has towards Linux. The stronger that.. the more people to show up.
fudcon-planning@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Paul W. Frields -
Robyn Bergeron -
Stephen John Smoogen -
Toshio Kuratomi -
Yaakov Nemoy