Re: Minutes: IRC Meeting 2014-09-17

Hi all

I ended up having quite a hectic week - PhD review (went well :) ) and a presentation that, predictably took way longer than planned, among other things, so I didn't get round to bugging venue people, apologies. Nattie and I need to chat a wee bit about this then we're good to go.

I made contact with Georg and sent a sponsorship email to this list.

I sent an email to my SiliconCape contacts, but no luck so far. I think I want to focus on the venues for the next week or so, and only think about sponsors after 7 October.

Then, some general questions please:

Does Debian have a slogan? Trying to wrap my head about how to 'sell' Debian in a catchy way to sponsors who may not know why this conference is so valuable. Graham came up with "Making free software more accessible" Thoughts, opinions? Somehow being a free operating system gives me a "so what" response; it's too broad.
Related to this, when I was looking at the Debian history and alles, I saw Richard Stallman has strong opinions regarding free vs open... "Free software is a political movement; open source is a development model." I suspect this may be a hornet's nest, perhaps, but we need to consider this when we create our 'brand'. I'm thinking very much along the line of growing the community here, and getting the right start (my thoughts all still very fluffy)
Have anyone given thought to getting a conference organising company to organise this? It is an extra cost, but is also less time-consuming for us. My experience was that they're very run-of-the-mill, but I am of a TEDx-mindset, more crazy and creative, and it sounds like Debconf may be more conventional in some ways.
More info: http://www.capetown.travel/content/page/event-organisers
Would private schools be good potential venues? They also have residences, and possibly good internet. e.g. SACS (which has links to UCT, for example - I'm thinking mainly internet and accommodation requirements here, but also a nice summer camp vibe potentially?) Bridge house in Franschhoek may be an 'off-site' candidate, but it seems the general consensus is to stay central.
Is the CTICC an option? They're bloody expensive though, is this a vibe we might be going for?
Is it too early to start thinking what high-profile speakers we would like to host? This will be a potential sponsor draw-card as well.

Cheers

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 11:53 PM, Stefano Rivera <stefanor@debian.org> wrote:

Sorry about the delay. Herewith, minutes!

Attendees:
* Bernelle
* Allison
* Adrianna
* Nattie
* Martin
* Stefano
* Graham

=== Bid Timeline ===
Bid is due on 1 Dec. We don't know exactly how far along we need to be,
but we think we should be down to a primary venue.

=== Venue Contacts ===
We have a draft letter, http://whiteboard.debian.net/86b9cc.wb, to send
to potential venues. (This has since been further discussed on this
list.)

We think there should be a single person contacting venues. So,

ACTION: Bernelle will make initial venue contacts, and then we may
delegate interested venues to other negotiators, for follow-up.

=== Venue reccie, post-pycon.za ===

Allison and Stefano will be in Cape Town, after pycon.za, on 6 & 7
October, so we will go and visit all the venues we are considering.

=== Initial budget, sponsor ideas ===

Allison is on the debconf sponsorship team, but we need local people to
get involved. All sponsorship negotiation must be run through the
sponsorship team, to avoid conflicts, and maintain sponsors across
DebConfs.

ACTION: Bernelle will contact her Silicon Cape contacts to find us a
sponsorship person.

ACTION: Bernelle will also try to get in contact with Georg Lerm and the
ArduinoCT people. Possibly via Marc?

The budget is probably going to be on the order of ZAR 2 million, based
on previous DebConfs.

We should probably try to help DC15's airline partnership outreach.

Bernelle will try some early contact of potential sponsors, to find out
what their timelines for sponsorship applications, are.

=== Assignment of (hypothetical) medium- to long-term tasks ===

We aren't ready to start staffing up all the teams, yet. But need to
start recruiting the local team.

SR

Full log:
https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf16/Bids/Cape_Town/Minutes/2014-09-17#Full_log

--
Stefano Rivera
http://tumbleweed.org.za/
+1 415 683 3272

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