On 2012-12-01 00:42, Ana Guerrero wrote:
It is a pity you (or others) didn't raise your concerns strongly back then.
To tell the truth, I think I was surprised that other people did not see them as big concerns when they were raised in the venue decision context.
This year, we're still in time to find a place that is suitable for more people. We can not achieve 100% but at least give people choice, even if some
It does seem to me that hypothetically a venue could be found which shares the qualities that the people who are enthusiastic about Le Camp like, while also having alternative accommodation nearby. However, it was necessary to listen when many locals protested at the idea of changing venues or continuing a search. While it is now said that the perceived "local veto" was a misunderstanding, the overall team, including me, responded to its perceptions of the locals' position by setting aside the search for alternatives and instead focusing on minimal changes needed to make the Le Camp contract acceptable to sign.
Of course, some people were enthusiastic about this venue precisely because everyone would be forced to stay in the same place, rather than disappear to hotels or to other restaurants/hotels. To me this logic doesn't work for Le Camp: people won't be forced to stay in the same place, but rather some of them will be forced by their accommodation preferences to stay far away, and some of them will just stay at home instead.
Costs won't change a lot from changing venues, no. But we can get something much better for a similar price. Pocock easily found other possible venues and I have found another interesting option I haven't shared on list, onlyin IRC.
There's not a lot of use claiming you have interesting options if you don't share them. I'm not sure where you mean on IRC, but I didn't see this on the #debconf-team channel. I would prefer that you posted it to the list -- I know some others will hate that, but whether it's better or worse than Le Camp, I'd rather that it was public now. Maybe there will be an obvious flaw that someone local can point out, rather than it staying as a secret proposal to be mentioned in complaints later on as if it had no faults of its own.
But that's something that I feel should be commented on by anyone who was initially for Switzerland/Le Camp, and now against it, not speculated about by me for whom the issues appear much the same as at the time of the bid decision meeting.That's exactly what I did in a previous email that you have probably read.For reference: http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20121122.153221.79d33304.en.html
I guess that at that point I still believed in the existence of the "local veto"; and while that may be the wrong name, I still do. We *have* delayed many months compared to when signing a contract was originally suggested (a good thing in my view), and we have made a good start to fundraising and have fixed some major budget and contract problems. But if the locals insist on staying with their originally preferred venue, and insist that they took a long time searching to find that this was the best, and that some will stop working on DebConf if we push another venue and others if we delay a decision at all, I'm not sure what you are proposing?
-- Moray