Re: [Debconf-team] Hotels reservation details
On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Richard Darst <rkd@zgib.net> wrote:
> This will *not* work. Attendees have already paid their fees, and it
> they are going to things like travel sponsorship and shipping.
>
> I repeat: This will NOT work.
>
> Here is what that would be like: We would transfer professional fees
> to DIVA to pay for hotels, and then DIVA would transfer the same
> amount of money to us to pay for travel sponsorship. This is clearly
> a ridiculous idea. The DIVA budget is not the DebConf budget - the
> DIVA budget is one part of a much larger whole. DIVA should be acting
> as our legal agents, not trying to decide everything for us.
As Richard says, DIVA can only see part of the budget locally. The
whole budget information is public, and we expected that they had been
following it from the mailing list, but now it seems that they had not
been.
We also have a long experience of organising DebConf, and we know what
works for DebConf attendees and what causes problems. We are in the
very final stages, now one week from when the first attendees arrive.
There is *not* time for us to discuss every issue from scratch, to
'persuade' DIVA that we are right in which option we want when there
are choices. The agreement signed a long time ago agreed that DIVA
would put into practice decisions of the whole organising team. We
should have been using the last days working together to arrange the
final details, not with DIVA trying to challenge Debian decisions.
It now seems that Debian's previous understanding of the budget,
including local information given by Adnan, was correct, and that
DIVA's panic about the budget was brought on by misunderstanding the
government's position, for example on the cost of the venue.
Richard's budget figures show that the relevant local spending does
*not* give a total close to the limit of the government money. As a
specific example, Richard's detailed calculations show that there is
*not* a big difference between using the cheaper hotels or Hotel Bosna
first, because we cannot put more than one person in a double bed,
except in a very small number of cases where people are coming as
couples.
We are all in agreement that costs should be kept down -- Debian spent
many months explaining that we did not need shuttles, pools, special
accommodation for VIPs etc.! But keeping costs down cannot include
making bad decisions that will lead to a bad DebConf.
--
Moray
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