Hi, This is becoming quite a flamewar and doesn't seem a productive use of everyone's time. I'm not going to reply point by point, but rather give a general overview of my opinion, both as having been part of the committee, a DebConf organizer, and part of the German bid at this time.
When the bid is selected in the decision meeting, the venue presented is just a proposal. It has happened a few times in the past that the venue had to be changed, and it was not a problem as long as the definitive venue met similar (or even better) characteristics as the one originally proposed. This means that if Mechelen is selected tonight, but then some unexpected event happens and it's not possible to have DebConf in the proposed venue, the Belgian team in cooperation with the global DebConf team would need to somehow figure out where and how to host DebConf instead. I think it's pretty clear that at this point the Heidelberg option is better than the Munich option. As has been already said too many times, we decided to keep both in order to have better negotiations and have a fallback plan in case of unexpected events. We do not intend to go with a lesser option. I believe it's in the power of the DebConf committee to say that they choose the German bid as long as their venue is equivalent to Heidelberg (that means, the currently proposed venue, or an equivalent venue), and that they consider the Munich venue significantly different at this time (i.e. a strong suggestion to drop Munich). It's also in the power of the committee to state that they see both options as adequate and let the final decision on the venue be done later on, when negotiations are finalized. As a last note, as Martin and Richard have stated, please keep in mind that what we all want is to host the best possible DebConf. Winning the bid does not bring money, power or fame to the winners, it just brings a lot of extra work. If we presented two venues is because we really think that both of them would be viable options for having a great DebConf, not because of a winning strategy. -- Besos, Marga _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
