Hi everybody, Some months ago I was in the bid decision meeting and I voted to have DebConf in Switzerland. It was not an easy decision, both bids were quite close and both have problems. In the meeting, there wasn't the possibility of not choosing any bid, something that now looking back should have been a valid outcome. At voting time, my heart was more excited about the idea of visiting Latvia, still I tried to choose rationally and I casted my vote for the swiss team. And not for the swiss bid as exactly presented as some people seem to think. I found that the swiss team was larger and seemed more motivated to work on improving the bid. For organizing DebConf, we need a local team who can work closely with the venue, sharing the stress and the workload on site in the last months while still keeping their personal life and the Latvian bid looked like a one-man bid.
Back to the meeting, the swiss local team have started negotiations with a venue and they have built a vision upon that venue. There was nothing still 100% sure although they were very excited about their vision. Their bid was presented with some plans B you still can find in the wiki, which I understood as there is nothing closed yet with going to the presented venue. And also, the bid was presented with some assumptions that later have not worked as expected. I was expecting the team (local and global) working in getting the bid better, not worse as it has became in the last months. Let me comment on some of this problems: * accommodation and camping. Back at the decision meeting: If you read the bid decision meeting [1], camping in 'le camp' didn't seem to be a problem. The venue still provided normal accommodation that wasn't fancy but quite decent with the biggest inconvenient being having a lot of big rooms. Le camp still have some smaller rooms but most of the people would have to go bigger rooms (see list of rooms and sizes at [2]). With some of the people camping, we wouldn't have to use in full the bigger rooms so things could end more or less equilibrated. Le camp is isolated from somewhere else, going to a hotel isn't a possibility unless you also have a car and are willing to drive at least 20m in the morning. This makes the option of staying externally quite costly, so having at least the camping option made me think the accommodation wouldn't be a big issue. What is the situation now: We can't camp. It is explicitly stated in the "conditions générales" [3] of le camp that camping is forbidden. Any override of this conditions must be clearly specified in the contract, which isn't the case at this moment. People wanting to go to DebConf are forced to sleep in le camp in the dorms. The alternative is car+hotel that is quite expensive even for swiss prices given you don't have a lot of hotels to choose from around. I did a quick search and if DebConf were in Geneva, people staying in a hotel would have only half of the costs. The problem with the big rooms and having all the people together in le camp is the total lack of privacy: people attending DebConf will be surrounded by people 24/7 which is very tiring emotionally for a lot of people. For kids, this is something natural and they tend to enjoy it, but it can affect negatively adult people who might end not having a fun and productive DebConf. * possibility of external catering Decision meeting: It was said we could hire an external catering and thus lower the food prices. The situation now: While le camp offers their installations with or without food provided, we are forced to buy the food from them. The reason to this is they have offered us some kind of forfeit that allows to have le camp only for us (dorms, talks and bof rooms,etc) if we get food from them and we pay a minimum of X people per day. I don't remember the number of people but it is CHF 4880 /day which results in 230 persons, if you calculate with an average bed price of CHF 21. This also includes DebCamp that is always less populated than DebCamp, so if the whole week of DebCamp we have 80 people, we need to have a lot of more people than 230 during DebConf to compensate. In a perfect DebCamp with 80 people 6 nights and a DebConf with 300 people every day for 7 days, we have: >>> (80*6+300*7)/13.0 198.46153846153845 we wouldn't reach the threshold. If you look at the numbers of people attending in previous years [4], this still looks like a high threshold. Think not everybody attends every day, so if DebConf12 had 187 attendees, it doesn't mean there were 187 people every day, rather 187 people spend at least one day. This forfeit is the kind of things are a good idea when presented but end being a trap. It doesn't give us any of the flexibility that saved our budget in previous years. The emails from Richard Darst are very illustrative in this point. * team starting to raise money very early Decision meeting: The team was aware of the costly DebConf and they would start raising money very early. Like from after ending DebConf12. The situation now: The team started 2-3 weeks ago. Why? Because the real problem here is the local team wants to do everything lineally and in some order they have thought, and DebConf doesn't work in this way. This is probably my biggest critic to the current local team. There are some strong dependences in DebConf organization, e.g. dates are *usually* not announced until venue (as in place to have talks and sleep) is closed. But things are never fully closed until a couple of months before the conference itself and some change 2 and 3 times. That gives us a lot of flexibility every year. As examples, a few years we have changed venues, dorms and in some cases, we didn't have a food plan until a couple of weeks before the conference. The local team wanted to avoid all this, but it has been shown every year, you can not avoid it because you can not control all the factors. The local team back at DebConf 8 thought they had the venue closed for months and the venue quit 2-3 months before the conference. They ended finding a better and cheaper venue. I still remember when Tincho (local team then) said: "You can not delay a DebConf until it's ready" This is one of the reason why it is asked to future localteams to get involved ready, to learn how to live in this chaos ;) Thanks for reading this far, Ana [1] bid decision meeting http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2012/debconf-team.2012-02-20-19.03.log.html [2] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20121030.194801.f5d584a1.en.html [3] http://www.lecamp.ch/pdf/conditions.pdf [4] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20121106.005241.300e527b.en.html _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
