[Debconf-team] reports from Le Camp "BSP", part 2: le venue & le contract
Hi,
so, second in a serious series of serious mails send on a Sunday night.
After the roundtable, Phillip Hug, Michele Cane and myself met with the
manager of Le Camp. Michele was present in previous negotiations with Le Camp
(and understands German) and Phillip was there, as he also wanted to get a
better understanding of the situation. Phillip is doing the finances for the
DebConf13 association and also is fluent in French and German.
To sum up a long story upfront, it now seems to me that many things were
communicated wrongly in many ways, when travelling (back and forth!) from
face2face meetings in French and in person resulting in a written contract in
French, which was then translated to English contract language and then read
with various more or less wrong assumptions, leading to more and more
discussions and wild speculations...
And, I obviously also fell for that trap. Thankfully "Saturday" helped me to
look at things from a different perspective, which I'll basically describe as:
let's assume Le Camp are good people who want DebConf13 to happen very well,
basically as we wish it, while obviously this also needs to cover their costs.
They are a foundation with basically humanistic/good goals (simplefied
summary..) so probably their desire to write things in the contract was due to
them wanting to _meet_ our wishes and _not_ making them difficult or make big
profit out of them, while still writing it down to cover their asses as we are
a pretty unusual "customer".
So with this perspective/idea I went into the meeting (not forgetting about
some other scenarios we discussed...) and...
voila, things made a lot more sense and things went very well. With these
forewords, now summary-style log:
* language was absolutly no issue, meeting was held in German, he speaks it
fluently (as well as English), sometimes very few things were (also) expressed
in English or French. Pas d'problem!
* I started with some nice words about the venue (which I truely believe btw)
and then briefly explaining Debian (1000 people, worldwide), DebConf, rotating
continents every year, listing previous locations and that I've been there,
also for pre-visits like this one, then quickly to local- and global-team and
DebConf chairs.., explaining that while I'm one of those three delegates (and
(I'm) in favor of le camp), we don't decide and neither will this meeting in
Le Camp now, as we met and decide "on the Internet".
* So, we're sorry, but our final decision will have to wait some more time,
so that we (3here) want to promise that we will have a decision within 4
weeks, we aim for faster, as its also better for us, but we dont want to
promise things we then might not deliver.
* We then started to discuss the contract and I explained that we've compared
their regular contracts (ie the one we also got for the BSP) with the dc13-
contract-draft and that those were quite different (for reasons I outlined
above) and that we will draft a new version of contract and send it to him.
(Phillip, Michelle and Didider took responsibility for this, after the
meeting, I asked them to send a copy to SVN.)
* only sometime in the meeting, when we discussed our food "needs+issues" he
realized that most of the attendees will have sponsored food (so then he
understood our complains/concerns much better) - before that he had no idea
most attendees are volunteers and get accom+food sponsored...! (Basically he
was also suspicious why we had such "strange requirements...)
* About paying in advance: we agreed to put something in the contract to pay
30k end of February 2012, second 30k end of May 2012, "but": two weeks later
is fine and if we'd only had 25k at that moment it would also be no big issue.
This will obviously not be part of the contract (because it would be silly)
but we all 4 consider it part of the deal.
* All the rest (aka the final bill) is due at the end of the conference,
which I think expresses the mutual trust nicely. And is also very convinient
to us.
* food: the cook was called (to avoid more proxied communication) and joined
meeting, he also is from the French part from Switzerland and speaks German
very well as well. cook was indeed way more flexible than manager assumed (and
"sold to protect him"), eg we can give number of exact meals a day in advance.
We are not forced to pay food for everyone, but also cannot leave it totally
open (Le Camp needs to plan+budget employes too), agreed on 80% of attendees'
nights (in average), to pre-communicate to them ~one-month in advance, then
give "final numbers" 10-day in advance, then the day before the final number
is fine. The cook also made the impression that he can cook tasty food :)
Vegan food (even if only for 3 or 4 people) is possible, thus we will have
vegetarian, vegan and "other food" ;)
* we also explained Cheese+Wine party, DayTrip, Conference Dinner and
DebianDay/Debian 20's birthday (likely to not take place in Le Camp but
maybe...) and that we essentially dont have plans for these yet but will let
them know. Fine.
* we invited both the cook and the manager to the cheese and wine party... do
I need to say they looked both very happy? :-)
* I do have the cooks email address and would like to pass it to someone who
will deal with food, I sadly won't have time for that and understandably the
cook wants one contact person from us - so I wont share it here. So, any
volunteers?
* So then we said good-bye to the cook and also concluded that our meeting
was basically over and that we were happy, that misunderstandings has been
cleared and mutual trust has been started to build up (quite successfully
IMO!) and then I expressed one personal issue...
* which is not so personal at all: what to do (exactly) when we reach >300
people... because until then the "idea" was: big tents were lots of people
sleep. (Which I think is basically a bad idea and not really camping nor
nice...)
* so I've "became personal" and suggested that personally I'd like to sleep
in a small tent and I think that it would work beautifully to have 20-30 2-3
people tents distributed over the venue, each "attached" to a house (so its
clear which toilets+shower to use) and that obviously I dont want a huge mess,
garbage floating around etc and that likewise eg the Le Camp would be too
crowded with 500 attendees or such. But 20-30 small tents, set up in some
areas we would define (so that we keep some structure and free spaces) that
would work very nicely and much better than 2-3 big tents and what he would
think about this... :) He admitted that he doesnt like the camping idea at all
(personally) but well, this indeed probably sense and sounds ok'ish.
* To be clear, off-meeting comment now: while I do personally think the above
20-30 smaller tents plan will work best, this is just a proposal from me atm.
If you'd prefer big tents... we just need to make sure to setup the tents
somehow/what "properly+nicely", whatever this means in detail. (There are lot
of steep areas, but there is also flat spaces next to a forest etc...) - and
there will also be a per person fee as there are still costs these persons
will cause. (Though obviously less then beds.)
So there is still need for negotiations(!) - Now, when we finalize the
contract but also when we do DebConf, we still need to respect their place (we
didnt talk about nudity yet ;) and they will also need to arrange with a bunch
of more or less strange geeks and their needs.
* At some point (not at the very end) he also made clear that the contract is
a draft, until when we sign it and then they'll sign it and then it's a
contract. (Which I take as positive / statement of what I thought before: it's
only a contract if both parties have signed :-)
I might have been somewhat vague on some aspects in this email (eg this very
last point), considering this list is (thankfully) publically archived. So I
thought about sharing some more about those aspects via svn-debconf-private or
private mail with long list of cc:s or something and came to the conclusion,
that I do not see the point in explaining why this or that misunderstanding
was a misunderstanding. Some of them are hopefully cleared after this mail,
some more hopefully after the new version of the contract (and budget) and for
the rest: please ask me on IRC. I do think the rest (of the misunderstandings)
is not worth re-iterating, but I'm also aware that you need to come to this
conclusion, not me. I've already reached that one :-D
So I rather want us to concentrate on the contract (or rather, how we can make
the best out of the given constraints (contract+venue+country and incoming
money) and how we can best influence these best (IMO by getting sponsors
sponsors sponsors!), instead of wasting time by explaining a misconception you
also see as such now.
But as said: do ask me, if needed I'll be happy to explain, even though I
think I already did in this very mail.
Oh, and I've been also mostly vague and quiet on budget+expenses details. We
did talk about those details and IMO in sufficient detail and with good
results. But _I_ didnt take notes on that, as I do think only the
budget+contract are relevant documents for that and since we have people
dealing with those. Thank you a lot for that, also for those who review and
question things!
cheers,
Holger
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