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blockers for opening registration; sponsorship window?



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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