Subsequent to my previous mail where I noted that details about the LeCamp accomodations have never been laid out on this list (though they may have been linked to the list), I've had IRC conversations with various folks that have given me a much clearer view of things. I think it may be useful to lay some of this out. The purpose of this mail is informational. I'll confine my editorialization here to a single remark that, having seen the full details of the room configurations, I think there is still cause for concern about the accomodations. I hope this mail will serve as a point of departure for discussing these concerns and working through them. The details about the rooms at LeCamp are available here: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/LeCamp/Rooms And details about off-site accomodation are here: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/AlternativeAccomodation Exposition: There are a total of 57 rooms available at LeCamp; some of these are designed for communal housing, some are set up only for sleeping bags (not beds). For the moment I'm assuming bed vs. sleeping bag is not an issue: some people will not mind sleeping bags, some people will not mind having roommates, and some people will mind both but there are some rooms that would meet their needs too. If we assumed a maximum room allocation of 2 people per room, that would accomodate 110 simultaneous attendees (4 of the rooms are single rooms). If we assumed a maximum room allocation of 4 people per room, that would accomodate a maximum of 171 attendees (44 people in double rooms, 3 in a triple room, 4 in single rooms, the rest in quad). Per [1], this falls short of the maximum per-night accomodation demand of every DebConf since DebConf 7, with the exception of DebConf 12 which probably had reduced attendance due to geographic location / travel logistics. DebConf 7, which had the lowest peak accomodation demand of any of the recent European DebConfs, also had the highest percentage of attendees who were *not* in sponsored accomodation. This is presumably due to some combination of local attendees and broad access to local non-sponsored accomodation, the latter of which is not generally available in Vaumarcus. Excluding the cost-prohibitive Chateau, there seem to be only on the order of 30 rooms available in a 10 km radius, with space for ~65 people. Assuming enough people are willing to pay per-night private room rates for the week, 171+65 == 236. This falls somewhere in the middle of the pack for peak attendance at DebConf (DebConfs 7, 11 were higher; DebConfs 8, 9, 10, 12 were lower). Therefore, I think we can expect that we will not be able to accomodate everyone who wants to attend DebConf 13 in a room of 4 or less. If we assume some number of attendees are willing to take sponsored communal accomodations, but most are not, and we reserve the two largest rooms (1x26 sleeping bags, 1x32 sleeping bags) for this with the rest of the rooms "undersubscribed" with a max of 4 occupants, this gives a maximum of 221 spaces on-site, plus the ~65 that may be available in hotels etc. in the surrounding area. Based on this, I think it's safe to conclude that accomodation space / comfort *will* be the limiting factor for a DebConf in Le Camp; and in any event, I would expect on-site attendance to fall well short of the 325 nominal spaces available. What I don't know is by how *much* it will fall short. I do know that at each DebConf where the standard accomodation was 4-per-room, there have been some number of attendees who have paid for private (1-person or 2-person) accomodation. Is it possible to mine the data, to get some idea of ratios of people attending DebConf who are willing to have bunkmates vs. people who have insisted on private rooms? Otherwise, we don't really have a model of what the accomodation limit is for the "typical" DebConf attendee, and we aren't really making an informed decision about whether holding DebConf at LeCamp is the right thing to do. -- 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 [1] http://rkd.zgib.net/http/debconf/historical-room-statistics.txt
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