Hi all, Just a quick status update to let y'all know where we are on opening registration. The short answer is that we're very close! The longer answer is that we have a few things to deal with before we can open; and rather than having a private todo list of these I'm sharing with the list in case anyone's able to help. For anyone who missed the memo, we are switching this year from using penta to summit, which is written in django. No one ever wants to maintain penta, and hopefully this year we can make that problem go away. A test site is available at <http://dc14-summit-test.dodds.net/>. This is an EC2 instance that all members of the DebConf team can have access to, as detailed on <https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Summit>. Also, a general note: while we originally thought that we would be doing all room registration through the PSU portal, and thus the team would be hands-off this year on the room assignments; after discussing further with the PSU team and seeing where things have gotten to with summit, we've decided it's better for *sponsored* attendees to be handled entirely by us. Non-sponsored attendees will still be able to register directly with (and make payment directly to) PSU for on-campus food and accommodations, and the registration workflow will direct registrants to the PSU website accordingly. Blockers for opening registration: - Meals: there are open questions about meal counts / payments with PSU for non-sponsored attendees that should be resolved before we point people at their website for payment. I'm working with our PSU contact to resolve this ASAP. - Hotels: we have a group rate at the University Place hotel, which is owned by the university, so will be providing a link to this also as an accommodation option when people register as non-sponsored... but we don't have the discount code yet from the hotel, and should also have this before we open registration. - Site navigation: as a few people have pointed out, once you've registered, you wind up without any clear way to get back to your registration data to review what you've set. I've started pulling in a navigation menu based on the one we already have at debconf14.debconf.org, but it needs some fine-tuning yet. - Added fields: the photo field is still missing (not mandatory anyway, but useful to have at registration time if we're going to have it), and one thing I found out today was that PSU had included in their form a place to capture whether attendees were interested in child care. Since PSU isn't actually providing this child care it makes more sense for us to take care of this within the DebConf team; and if we think there's actually interest in this then it's better to capture the information early. So I'm going to add a field asking people to indicate if they have interest in group child care. - Sponsorship schema fixes: summit has an existing setup for handling sponsorship requests, as well as sponsorship approvals; the current registration form doesn't tie into it. We should fix this, so we don't have to deal with either data migration or reimplementing sponsorship support afterwards. I'm planning on working on the last three points over the weekend. I don't expect the external blockers will be resolved until Monday, so that's my target now for opening registration. If anyone wants to help with the summit work, I'm happy to coordinate on IRC (#debconf-team). And if anyone sees any other issues with the website that we should take care of, but that aren't blockers for opening registration, feel free to stick them in summit/debconf_website/TODO in the git repository. Once registration opens, how long should we keep the registration window open? I was aiming to have registration go live by April 15, and give people a full month - until May 15 - to request sponsorship; that would then give the bursaries team another week to make their decisions and still let us notify sponsorees 3 months before the conference start so that they can book their flights. But we now don't have four months and a week, so that time line no longer works. Where should we make the cut? I don't want to give the bursaries team less than a week to finalize their decisions, given that we don't even have the bursaries team populated yet. Is a three-week window for requesting sponsorship long enough? Or do we bite the bullet and allow the finalized bursaries run later (with higher ticket prices for everyone)? -- 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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