On Jul 10, Scott Dier wrote: > * Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> [020709 20:32]: > > - Housing in general was less than satisfactory. I realize this is a > > dorm, and the price was right (particularly after multiplying by 2/3), > > but I found the conditions to be bordering on squalid. > > Then you could have easily paid more than twice as much on a hotel room. > I checked. Nevermind the need for transport (rented car?) at that > point. Some cities aren't cheap. The YorkU rooms were a steal. There is some debate on this point. My most serious issue was that four strangers + ones' self in a confined space seems a bit of an overload; if I'd known beforehand I was going to be sharing with four people, I probably would have gotten a hotel room. (Note that this isn't the fault of Joe or anyone else except Hospitality York.) > > particularly since the only feasible alternatives were on-campus > > ripoff dining facilities. > > Hahahaha. You've never been to a university in the US with outsourced > food to only one company (aramark) who sucks more than any fast food > joint you can think of. Yes I have. I work at such a university. (In fairness, my C$ <> US$ mental converter wasn't working all that well when I watched $10 disappear from my wallet every time I wanted to eat something.) I think the larger issue - that YorkU was pretty isolated from the rest of the universe - shouldn't be overlooked, particularly since the whole schedule was so ad-hoc that if you tried to do anything for lunch, you might miss half the next talk before you got back. If nothing else, a semi-catered meal would have made it easier to fit into schedule overruns; if nothing else, when the pizza shows up, the presenter has to stop. > > locations that are convenient for "tourist stuff," not university > > campuses in outer suburbia.) > > Yes, and then we run into the 'charging a fee' bit and paying 2-4x for > hotel costs. A few minutes on the subway and bus didn't kill me. Hmm, but you didn't lose your backpack like srbaker. :-) My general point is that it would have been nice to be somewhere where it wasn't a big production to do the "tourist stuff". Again, "would have been nice", not "essential or else the conference is a failure". In fairness, this isn't a YorkU-specific problem; relatively few universities are both in big cities and convenient to stuff. (Not many are even all that convenient, even in smaller places.) I think most of my concerns are to do with communication and time management, really, and I can't think of a single problem that couldn't be dealt with fairly easily for the next DebConf. Simple stuff, like a central web page at conference.debian.org; better details on accomodations; more info on "what to expect at RandomU"; proceedings (copies of the presentations - transcripts would be even cooler); etc. It's all in the details. Also bear in mind that I'm used to academic conferences with hundreds of participants and huge budgets and printed programs and conference hotels and open-bar receptions and the like. I realize DebConf isn't an academic conference, but there are lessons to be learned from them. Lastly, I'm not doing this to rip on the people who made this happen; I want to make DebConf 3 better. Chris -- Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@olemiss.edu> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/ Instructor and Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Univ. of Mississippi 208 Deupree Hall - 662-915-5765
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