[Debconf-team] Le Camp Accomodation - Bed selling and prfessional fee
Hi
It's already some time since I started the wiki page collecting ideas
for organizing the accomodation at Le Camp[1]. With this mail I'd like
to start the discussion about how we want to organize the allocation of
the more comfortable beds and how to combine (or not combine) this with
professional fee.
Before a more detailed plan about how to do the whole allocation can be
made, a few questions need to be decided by the team:
* Do we want to sell the better beds at all?
While some of us would like to keep money completely out of DebConf
provided accomodation nobody has come up with an alternative proposal
yet. I think there is more or less consensus that it's unfortunate that
we have to do this, but the best way to actually allocate the more
comfortable beds is to sell them.
* How should the bed selling work in conjunction with the professional
fee?
It was suggested several times that the professional fee and the
accomodation and food costs should be separated. To do this we need to
define the individual prices for each item. I suggest that we define
three prices (attendence fee per week, food per day (for 3 meals) and
accomodation costs per night).
* Which beds should be sold?
Depending on the definition of a "more comfortable" bed more or less
beds can be sold at all. It's quite obvious to me that we can't ask for
the same amount for each of these beds. Depending on the cut of point
between 48 (all single/double rooms) and 155 (all non sleeping-bag beds)
can be sold.
* Who should be eglible to buy more comfortable beds?
The question is if persons paying the professional fee should have
priority in any way. Either with a requirement that you pay professional
if you want to buy one of these beds or by giving them priority if there
is a shortage.
Another aspect is if Debian contributors should have preference over
accompanying persons. Would it be acceptable if a family occupies a 4
bed room if there is more demand than available beds?
* Prices
We need to define the price for the various items:
- Beds (for each category)
- Food
- Professional and corporate attendence fee
I would like to delegate this to the "money/budget people". It would be
nice to have a proposal for the next meeting. There was also an idea
floating around to make an auction. While if we belive in the
traditional economic theory this would be the fairest solution (for
their difinition of fair), this is IMO not practicable.
* How should the bed reservation work in practice?
My vision for this is that we have an online reservation system where
people can reserve a bed in a specific room. Each bed would have a price
tag per night. Ideally the reservation system would also show a picture
of the room and a plan for the building. Anyone keen on building such a
system? Would it be possible to integrate this in to frab or penta?
A self-service online reservation system would also allow people to book
rooms together with their friends.
* How should the payments be done?
As far as I know professional fee payments have been done in advance
before the conference usually. This has the advandtage that the money is
already in our account and if people don't show up we at least have the
money. On the other hand with the bed selling the amounts will probably
be a lot smaller than in the past and more people have to pay something.
So the logistics get more complicated and the amount of transaction fees
we have to pay increases. The Swiss army knive orders we did last year
showed that international bank transfers are sometimes prohibitively
expensive for smaller amounts. We probably need a way to pay by credit card.
An alternative would be to collect the money in cash on-site. What do
the accounting/money people think about this?
I'd like to gather the feedback from team members to these questions
before the meeting next Thursday. So that we ideally can already decide
about some of these questions there.
Gaudenz
[1] https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/AccomodationImprovements#Accomodation_Issues_at_Le_Camp
--
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
~ Samuel Beckett ~
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