Quoting Steve Langasek (vorlon@debian.org): > In that case, I think the best option would probably be to rent the ballroom > (600 person capacity) for just the opening and closing plenaries. I avoided > including this in the bid originally because I know the video team prefers > not to have to move equipment around between rooms, so it's preferable to > not use "special" rooms for only part of the time; however, the ballroom > comes pre-equipped with a complete A/V setup, so if we need the use of a > larger space for the plenaries we can probably make this work and avoid > incurring huge added costs from renting space we're not using for the whole > week. About this topic : from my own experience, I would advise *against* targeting a "big" conference room, except maybe for opening/closing sessions (ok, that puts aside the difficulty of setting up a romm only for two sessions, for the video team). During last Debconfs, talks and sessions *except* the opening and closing ones were *not* overcrowded. They were even a bit depressing when the camera zooms over the audience. So, having very big rooms with very few people spread out in them is not a really good thing. IMHO, a 150-seater for the "big" room is enough. OK, there might be people who would have to stand up at the back of the room, or sit down in the alleys, or whatever else. But, as long as the local policy prohibits that for security reasons, where is the problem? This is DebConf, not a formal conference with gazillion of official people with ties and suits. So, being a little bit iconoclast, I would say : forget about the big rooms. If this is possible (and, again, forgetting a bit about video team needs...sorry, guys) - for opening/closing sessions : max 150-seater - for regular sessions : one 100-seater, or even 75-seater and another 30-50 seater - not too many rooms : last year, we had too many. One was mostly unused as a talk room. And if local security constraints allow for overpacking rooms, I would even say that a 100-seater might be enough. This is however my opinion and I would understand people don't share it..:-)
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