On 1/31/07, Thomas Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * It would be useful to produce a list of things that we know we > need to spend money on and have a rough idea of how much it might > cost
I will send you the last version of the GUADEC2006 accounts I have. We will make it public, but I want to check first with Chema that the numbers are correct. I will also blog about where I think (from the 2006 experience) that money can be saved and better spent. > Catering Glynn warned us last year and is warning you this year. He is right, this is a complex issue. I would recommend: a) Leave the service altogether to the caterers available in the venue, if you find that the relation price/quality is good. If you do so you need to arrange the deal and make sure you have the money to pay. There must be always a vegetable option (we had about >25% in Vilanova and nobody complained) and the easiest is to avoid pork meat at all. b) If a) is not possible or too risky, solve with vouchers/money the problem for people requesting meals sponsorship. Consider sponsor dinners as well if you have the budget for that. The impact of that money is not big if you are in the numbers of last GUADEC, and I agree some people really need it. c) Be *really* careful if you are making people pay meals together with inscriptions. It can be a mess if not properly managed. If I would be in February 2006 now I would have spent less money in i.e. bags and I would have tried to fully sponsor meals instead. In order to make such decisions you need to have the money first, though. d) In any case try to find the perfect solution for the Core days, when most of the registered people will be in place and willing less to go away, sleep till late, make a trip to London... Planning meals for non-Core days is much more complicated and at least myself feel some kind of pain seeing how paid and cooked food goes to the waste because just a % of the people came that day. > * Booking out a youth hostel may be a last resort, but there were > concerns about security. People with less resources tend to worry less about security (if you mean having your cool gadget stolen). There must be a place for those willing to pay few-to-nothing for accommodation. You know better than anyone if this place is the youth hostel or a cheap hotel around. Anyway, if you are aiming to keep the amount of people sponsored in 2006 (more or less) you will need to negotiate a group accommodation with someone. > * Gnome branded laptop stickers was one idea of something novel and > interesting people may appreciate They are planned for the GNOME Store - see http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/GnomeStore It would be really useful if GUADEC2007 marketing purchases were done in coordination with the GNOME Store, otherwise the store itself looses a lot of sense. Yes, I know such store doesn exist today. In fact it exists as backend, we are still working in the frontend. We can start talking about offer and prices if you want. As you see in the wiki page, T-shirts, Polo shirts, Stickers and Mugs are already in the queue of production. The more the GNOME Store can sell to customer GUADEC the better we will be able to serve individual customers due to wholesale prices and etc. > * Branded USB drives were another idea We got a budget for those as well. We decided to leave it for later at the GNOME Store since we didn see them as something viable by their own. However, everything changes if you decide to ask for a quote for 300 or so. > * Possibility of using Spreadshirt to print t-shirts. Killermundi please (our provider behing the GNOME shop) > * Possibility of polo shirts for helpers? The sooner you know your helpers the better you will able to provide them a nice polo shirt fitting in their contributing bodies. Ask Andy what red t-shirt he got at Vilanova... (and he was one of the first volunteers to join the team!! but we followed alphabetical order in the "cerimony" and Wingo... you know). > o Anything more than £100 would need to be invoiced. Please study *carefully* all the expenses relating to sponsored people and invited speakers. There is a lot of money invested in travel and accommodation. I don't know how is the system in UK, but in Spain we could have saved a lot of time/money with a clear policy for requesting invoices (not just plain tickets) in order to recover the VAT. For the Call for Participation we simply used the Flexinode module in Drupal, that allows to define the form elements of a page. -- Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org _______________________________________________ guadec-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/guadec-list
