Hey folks, I had a meeting with an administrative agent working for the Concordia Student Union (CSU) today. CSU is willing to rent rooms for us at Concordia University for free. ## Dates The best dates to hold a conference at Concordia are the 2 last weeks of August, after the summer term finals. I told them the best dates for us would be from Thursday August 13th to Sunday August 16th. *We will need to confirm those dates (and the rooms we want to rent) before the end of November to make sure we have the rooms we want.* ## Rooms As long as we don't rent any of the rooms with high-end cinema equipment (like Concordia's main conference hall), we can rent whatever rooms we need. Here is a link to rooms we can rent on the main campus [1], with a description of the equipment in them. This PDF [2] lists the total capacity of the rooms. It seems most room have a projector, but we might have to rent one elsewhere since we need HDMI support and most of the rooms seem to only support VGA. If we need to, we can go and have a look at the rooms ourselves in between classes, but rooms might be locked if no one uses them. The administrative agent told us room MB-3.345 [3] would be a good pick in terms of size and disposition of seats for a main talk room. Most (if not all) rooms in the Hall building are wheelchair accessible, but we will need to make sure it's the case. To have access to the projecting screens and AV system in the rooms, we need to rent the room's "podium key". We won't even be able to use the projecting screens without it. There is a fee of 50 CAD per room per day for the key. Concordia is open from 07:00 to 23:00 and we can use the rooms during those hours. [1]: https://www.concordia.ca/it/services/classroom-support/sir-george-williamscampus.html [2]: http://www.concordia.ca/content/dam/concordia/services/event-planning/docs/Concordia-DSA-List.pdf [3]: https://www.concordia.ca/it/services/classroom-support/sir-george-williamscampus/sgw-mb-3.html ## Networking Will need to go through CSU to make networking requests. ## Food During the Summer, Concordia's dining halls are closed so we won't be able to tell people to go there to eat. We can use Concordia's public spaces to eat and they prefer if we don't eat in rooms. If the rooms aren't clean enough at the end of the conference, we might be charge a cleaning fee of 120 to 180 CAD per room. People's Potato will be closed so we can't ask them to cook for us. There are a lot of food options around the campus though, as it's downtown. ## Accommodation People can rent Concordia's dorms [4] during the Summer if they need a place to stay. McGill also has dorms for rental (we used them for DC17). [4]: https://www.concordia.ca/summer/accommodations.html ## Speakers We need to warn CSU if we bring in some high profile speakers, as Concordia University is likely to require us to hire security agents. I reassured them and told them we mainly wanted to have an alternative space for people that don't want or can't go to Israel for DebConf. As I see it, our goal is not to concurrence DebConf20, but to give people alternatives. ## Minors As per Concordia University's policies, we need to know if minors are going to attend the conference. If that's the case, it will make things more complicated on the administrative side and require a lot more paperwork on CSU's side. CSU will come back to us on that, since it might be that a conference whose main audience is adults but where _very few_ minors happen to be would be OK. ## Insurance CSU has a general liability insurance that will cover us. We will need to check for a more specific insurance if we need one (theft, AV material rented, etc.). -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ pollo@debian.org / veronneau.org ⠈⠳⣄
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature