Re: [Debconf-team] Meeting with Le Camp
On 08/08/12 23:40, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
> The number of attendees to talks and the number of people having food at
> LeCamp can probably be taken up (iff the respective additional money comes in
> adequately) by some dozens (lets say +50). But there's indeed a hard limit of
> 325 _beds_ in LeCamp (that the DebConf commitee very much knew of). There are
> alternate accomodation eventualities for individuals [0] but they are
> addmitedly quite distant. We are also discussing the possibility of extending
> the hosting capabilities of Le Camp either by allowing private tents (very
> unlikely) or by providing a bigger group-tent (also unlikely, but less so). In
> anycase, we'll have more answers after the next meeting at LeCamp [1].
>
> I have put the "DebConf13 venue decision" up for decision by the DebConf team
> at its next meeting [2]; both the localteam volunteers and Le Camp need to
> know rather soon if DebConf13's going to happen there or not. In my
> understanding, the DebConf team is entitled to decide if the limit makes it a
> "no-go" or not and I'd really prefer having the cut of enforcing a venue
> change done early rather than late.
So, I re-read Moray's analysis from about a month ago¹. The numbers
there are attendee counts, not accomodation counts, so they're off but I
think we can apply some guesswork.
Looking at that, it seems that the actual attendee count was over 325
for DebConfs 7 and 11 and 306 for DebConf10. So it doesn't look too bad,
although it's Switzerland, which is very centrally located so it'll
probably have more attendees than Cáceres or Bosnia.
However, what's more worrying is that blog post's second graph, the
"number of confirmed attendees", which has been 455, 415 and 450 for
DebConfs 7, 10 and 11. Based on that, I think we can expect *at least* a
similar count for DebConf13. I also doubt that >= 100 of those people
will register with alternate accomodations, esp. when it's far away from
the venue as you say.
(all of the above are statistics of a small sample and guesswork, so I
might be way off; I'd be interested in other people's analyses)
Hence it seems to me that the only way you're going to pull this off is
by overbooking until the very last minute and basically saying "we have
more reconfirmed people than beds, but we've seen a trend of a 85%
actual/confirmed attendees ratio in the past, so we're not expecting all
of them to actually arrive".
IMO, it might work but it sounds very risky. Taking risks is part of the
organization process though, so if you're willing to risk it, I have
absolute faith in you.
Regards,
Faidon
¹: http://morayallan.livejournal.com/12139.html
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