[Debconf-team] Minutes from the last meeting
Hi!
Here are the minutes of what we talked last Monday afternoon/night.
It's a bit long, because we talked about a lot of things.
About finishing with DC7:
The Final Report is almost done. Once the report is done, Steve
will send out the sponsor bags. The idea is that it will be done in
the next two weeks.
The last couple of financial bits have to come in (1 bill, 1 sponsor).
The last bundle of T-shirts have been shipped.
About DebConf Dates:
There's a wiki page with the pro's and con's of each pair of weeks
[1], but we are missing the information about other conferences that
might clash. Moray volunteered to start the page [2]. If you have
knowledge of any other conferences that might be worth mentioning,
please edit the page.
The decision will be taken on the next IRC meeting. After that, we
will book the conference-rooms, thus blocking the dates in the Hotel.
[1]: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Dates
[2]: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/OtherConfs
About PentaBarf:
We want to have an updated version of Penta, that includes a lot of
things that we wanted to have fixed. Jörg and Damian will work on
that.
An "Assassins" module is being planned, in order to eliminate human error.
There were quite a bunch of things that didn't go that well with
Penta last year. Since it doesn't make sense to discuss all of them
in IRC, we decided we should do a wikipage with all those things.
This hasn't been started yet.
About Sponsors:
The local Sponsors team: Marcela and Martín Albisetti (beuno) will
join the main Sponsors team, in which we hope most of this year's team
will remain.
We don't have certain numbers, but work with an estimated budget of
USD 120k, and an estimated number of attendees of about 350 for
DebConf and 50 for DebCamp.
For existing Sponsors, we want to start contacting them about
DebConf8 as soon as the Final Report is out.
We are going to try out the Sponsors categories that were already
discussed at the beginning of this year. The difference between each
sponsor will be shown in the size of their logos and the placement on
the T-shirt. Martín Albisetti and Marcela will bring a proposal about
amounts of money and names for the categories, for the next IRC
meeting.
About Money Transfers:
Money stuff is a bit complicated in Argentina. They charge us a
minimum fixed amount per transfer, and thus it doesn't make much sense
to receive many small transfers, but rather few big transfers.
Apparently, the problems that we had this year with SPI won't be
much of a problem next year, since there's a "delegation" in place
that allows us to deal with DebConf money without much trouble from
the the SPI treasurer.
Also, apparently, SPI will be implementing a way of paying them by
Credit Card which would be useful for our paying attendees (see
below).
So, we should have a small list of accounts where smaller Sponsors
would transfer the money, and then we can get it in bigger bunches.
About Attendee Categories:
I suggested the introduction of attendee categories, similar as how
it is done for linux.conf.au (It seems both Phil and other corporate
people had already suggested this in the past).
The basic idea is to have participants that make their company pay
for their attendance fee. So, divide participants in 3 groups:
"Individuals" (they don't pay), "Professionals" (they pay for their
stay, i.e. U$S 250 the week), and "Corporate" (they pay more, e.g. U$S
1000).
Companies wouldn't expect to get anything for attendance fees, but
we can list them in a separate page that shows all the companies that
have attendees at the conf.
We can also ask the "Individuals" if they want to pay.
The main problem with this idea is getting hold of the money. If
SPI were to accept payments done by Credit Card, it would make the
billing for the attendance fee much easier.
About WiFi:
It doesn't make much sense to get a WiFi sponsor to lend equipment
(as Aruba), since the Hotel is already equipped with wireless, and we
can't lay our own cables between floors (we can do as much as we want
in the conference/hacklab floor). Also, the hotel has spots for
adding extra APs in case they are needed.
About Customs:
We are investigating the necessary papers for importing hardware for
a short term. Damian is in charge of figuring out all the legal stuff
needed for this.
About Press:
Martin Krafft will be in charge of the press team for DebConf8, but
he needs more locals to contact him. He's already sent a mail to the
localteam list [3], but nobody has replied yet. I will send another
one, trying to get more people to join the team.
The idea would be to try to get press contacts during the next year,
so that when the mailing moment comes, things are easier.
[3]: http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20070820.095913.05dc819b.en.html
About the Website:
Martín Ferrari (Tincho) is our webmaster.
After some internal talks, we decided to go with static pages, using
server-side-includes for the header/footer/menu. This is how the DC6
site was done. We like it. We don't like any CMS. We don't want our
main website to be a wiki.
We would like to be able to give access to commits to the website to
people that might not necessarily need access to the whole
debconf-data repo. Jörg said that this can be accomplished by having
a separate svn for the website.
One important thing is to have the website as the main source for
information. This year, some things were in Penta, some in the Wiki,
some in the static pages at ~joerg.
About Future Meeting dates:
We decided to meet the third Monday of every month, at 19:00 UTC.
Next meeting will then be October 15th, 19:00 UTC. The agenda
[4]: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Meetings
--
Besos,
Marga
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