Hi team,
Kees and I had another meeting at PSU today to dig into the nitty-gritty of
the conference setup. One of the points that was raised is that, since the
price of the space we are using for the plenaries went up between our
original quote and the final contract, it's now the same price as the main
ballroom; so there's a suggestion to use the main ballroom instead, which
would accommodate more people (600 people max, instead of 172 max).
Currently, our reservation looks like this:
Aug 21 (setup day 1):
server room
talk rooms 1 & 2
hack lab 1
Aug 22 (setup day 2 / arrival day):
server room
talk rooms 1, 2, 3
hack lab 1
Aug 23-31 (DebConf):
server room
talk rooms 1, 2, 3
hack labs 1 & 2
The general idea here was to ramp up the rooms a few at a time during the
setup, rather than paying the rental for the whole set of rooms from the
beginning when we wouldn't be completely set up until the 23rd anyway.
However, if we decide to use the ballroom for the plenaries, then it doesn't
make as much sense to phase in the setup of the talk rooms at the same time
- and it definitely increases our overall costs for the rental.
So I propose the following modified room rentals:
Aug 21 (setup day 1):
server room
hack lab 1
Aug 22 (setup day 2 / arrival day):
server room
plenary room (4 hours in the afternoon/evening only)
hack lab 1
Aug 23 (opening ceremony):
server room
plenary room
talk rooms 1, 2, 3 (4 hours in the afternoon/evening only)
hack labs 1 & 2
Aug 24-30:
server room
talk rooms 1, 2, 3
hack labs 1 & 2
Aug 31 (closing ceremony):
server room
plenary room
hack labs 1 & 2
Is this realistic for getting AV equipment and network drops moved between
the rooms? I know that we prefer not to have to move equipment between
rooms at all; in this case, given that the choice is between moving
equipment between rooms, or moving equipment around when repartitioning a
single room, I'm not sure this makes a difference. In fact, in some ways
this seems better since it's then possible to be setting up two of the talk
rooms while the opening plenaries are happening - whereas otherwise they
couldn't be set up at all until the end of plenaries.
Carl on IRC seemed to think this was ok, but we would need to be sure we had
the manpower to make this happen.
And it appears that with this approach our total rental charges would
actually come down by $220 for the week.
The only disadvantages I see are that it gives us one less day for burn-in
testing of the talk room setup; and it requires tearing down the talk rooms
the evening of August 30 and setting back up in the plenary room the morning
of August 31. On balance, this looks ok to me, but I also have no video
team experience.
One way or the other, I need to get back to PSU with concrete plans for the
room setups on Monday, so please send any comments on this proposal by
Sunday.
Thanks,
--
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
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