--- Begin Message ---
Hi folks,
In my previous mail I concluded that accomodation will be the limiting
factor for attendance at DebConf 13.
This does not preclude LeCamp as a valid choice for DebConf. There is
always *some* limiting factor. Sometimes, it's ticket prices / travel
sponsorship availability; other years, it's travel times; still others, it's
scheduling vs. university exams; and so forth.
The important thing is not to try to remove all limits, but to understand
what those limits *are* and work within them appropriately. As of this
morning on IRC, Holger was still claiming that Le Camp has "270 comfortable
beds [...] and we can camp". I think this shows a serious underestimation
of the impact that privacy concerns will have on DebConf attendance.
There are cultural, age, life status, and gender factors that play into what
people consider acceptable accomodations, and I think the team needs to give
more credence to these factors than they have so far. For some of us,
sharing a bedroom with your 31 (or even 5) closest friends is something only
for kids' summer camp and voluntary military service. It's possible that my
own cultural background causes me to over-emphasize this concern, but I'm
absolutely certain that these figures of 270, 300 are underemphasizing it.
My projection from the previous mail is that we will "fill" Le Camp with 221
people. You might be able to find more people willing to sleep in communal
accomodation (it's free, after all) and ratchet that number higher, but I
don't believe at that point you're getting the people to DebConf that we
*want* to have there for Debian's benefit. I think that even at 221, we are
going to be suppressing turnout among developers.
The question is whether this is ok. I asked Didier on IRC if he thought
holding DebConf at LeCamp was the right thing to do if it meant only having
221 people accomodated on site, and he said yes. That's enough answer for
me, so I consider this settled. But if other people still believe we're
going to get 270, 325, or more people housed at LeCamp, I think they need to
sanity-check their assumptions. If you think drawing the line at 200 or 220
people means we shouldn't have the conference at LeCamp, you should speak up
before we're committed to a contract.
And if anyone has any illusions that it's going to be ok to get more than
220 people at LeCamp because they'll start pitching tents as soon as people
are uncomfortable with the bedding arrangements (instead of when all the
beds are filled), then they had damn well better be making sure that's
allowed by the contract.
Now, the title of this mail is "Suggestions for a successful DebConf".
Assuming that we do go ahead with LeCamp, the concerns about accomodation
will not go away. The accomodation team is going to have a particularly
hard time of things this cycle, and I think we need to start preparing for
that. I volunteer to help with the accomodation team to try to stay on top
of this. My suggestions:
- Make the options for accomodation explicit at registration time. Make it
clear to registrants that there is limited "semi-private" accomodation
available, and that some attendees will be given communal accomodations.
Give registrants a way to explicitly say that they prefer not to attend
DebConf rather than stay in the communal accomodations.
- Give preference to Debian contributors in the semi-private accomodation.
- Indicate to registrants, at sponsorship confirmation time, what their
sponsored accomodation will be.
- Decide what we want to do about couples accomodations. Note that there
are various couples in Debian who both meet our typical standards for
sponsorship - should they be given first priority on the double rooms?
Should developers be allowed to bring non-sponsored partners if they pay
a fee? Should they pay a different fee for a 4-person room than if they
want a 2-person room?
- Decide on a general policy for whether we allow people to buy privacy by
paying for empty beds. (Offhand, I think the answer here needs to be
"no", and that such people need to be directed to offsite accomodation
instead.)
- Flesh out <http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/AlternativeAccomodation>
with more concrete recommendations for offsite accomodation. Today it
was mentioned on IRC that Yverdon would be a viable option that has bus
connections; this is the first time I've heard this mentioned as an
option. Details need to be on that page. DebConf should not be a travel
agency in the sense of booking rooms and handling pass-through of money,
but people will need help figuring out viable accomodation options due to
the constraints of the location.
- Fix the professional and corporate registration categories. This has
already been a source of confusion in the past due to mismatched
expectations. I don't think it makes sense to accept registration
payments from companies and then give their attendees 4-to-a-room
accomodation. If we can't guarantee these people double rooms, we
shouldn't take their money - and I don't know that we are going to be
able to guarantee them double rooms. It may be that we should figure out
a fixed rate to charge people for the privilege of a double room,
offering this rate to everyone, and then set the professional/corporate
registration rates as a premium on top of that.
I think implementing the above will go a long way towards making DC13 as
pain-free as possible.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
--- End Message ---