[Debconf-team] Minutes from today's meeting
Fast meeting today. These are the minutes of what was talked about:
* Local team status, Hotel/ISP status.
After the "other conf at the same time" mess, we finally got the conf
rooms confirmed by the hotel. Unfortunately, they aren't the ones we
had chosen from the beginning, but they are not too bad either.
Currently they have no wifi. But the Hotel is planning to remodel
them on March, and they probably will add wifi by then. We will know
this for sure in a few weeks. If not, then we will add the APs
ourselves.
We won't switch rooms. We will stay always in the same rooms, and add
an extra room during DebConf. We get the talk room on Sunday, but for
videoteam setup we can have it before (i.e. before the other conf),
this would mean to do everything that's needed (test the audio, test
the lighting, etc), before the other conf comes. Then comes the other
conf, then us. So, videoteam setup should be done during DebCamp.
We will be going this Friday to the hotel, to try an negotiate the
prices, which are currently a bit higher than what we would like. So
we will send more info after that.
Regarding the ISP, we haven't got confirmation yet, but we are still
working on it. We have an offer that looks promising, where the telco
will join several cables and do the "bonding" themselves, giving us
one big broadband (i.e. not several ADSLs bonded by a router). We
want fiber, and we were told there IS fiber at the hotel's door, but
the telco denies it's existence. The telco is Telefónica de Argentina
(which is the same Telefonica from Spain, and many Latin American
countries).
The connection that they could provide by using many copper pairs
bonded is a carrier class connection of 10Mb/s (symmetrical).
* Sponsorteam status
Money from sun is finally coming for dc7. There are quite a few
sponsors just about ready for invoicing in the eu/us. Sponsors from
the US should be invoiced by spi. Sponsors from the EU should
transfer directly to Argentina, the non-profit company behind DebConf8
is called "Fundación Via Libre", and it's the one that handles the
transfers.
* Amount of volunteers
The issue of how many volunteers both locals and from far away we want
was raised.
Regarding foreign volunteers, everyone can set themself as volunteer -
but it doesn't make a large difference in terms of travel sponsorship.
If when they come they actually do volunteer work, they get a t-shirt.
If not, the value doesn't have much significance.
Regarding local volunteers, the idea is to make them work in shifts,
for Front Desk, talks, etc, working an amount of hours per day
(Something like 5 for Front Desk and 4 for cameras/audio/microphones).
They can staff rooms, and do other things that just need to be done,
we can rely on them to be there from XX:YY til ZZ:AA (we will publish
a schedule of who should be where).
The amount of volunteers needed for this structure is around 30 (for
DebConf itself). We have many local Debian users (but not
contributors) wanting to volunteer in order to be able to stay at the
DebConf venue for free, so I think we might even have to ask some
people to either pay or stay in some other place.
* Sponsor categories regarding DebianDay stands
The amounts that were decided for the sponsor categories were decided
for US/EU sponsors. Local sponsors don't usually have that kind of
money, and most of them would like to have a stand at DebianDay (which
is only given for 15k USD or more).
The issue was raised that for local sponsors these categories are a
bit too much, and we would like (for Argentinian sponsors only) to
have the categories in ARS instead of USD (which means DebianDay stand
would be given for 5k USD instead of 15k). There was not much
opposition regarding this.
We will still approach sponsors with the international categories, so
that if they can afford it, they go for them. But in case it's too
much (for many it will be too much), re-categorize.
* Next meeting: March 17th, 20:00 UTC.
Log: http://meetbot.debian.net/meetbot/debconf-team.log.20080218_2000.html
--
Besos,
Marga
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