Re: [Debconf-team] DebCamp and DebConf dates
From budget, and past experiences, arrival days will be Friday and Saturday. Should we start talks on Saturday late afternoon (plenaries: Welcome and one/two additional) or as usual, Sunday morning? Or on Monday? Is open weekend a parallel sessions for public (parallel to DebConf?) Is last Saturday still a talk day? a full talk day? Leave us (content team) a couple of weeks and we'll back to you, we are almost done with that. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] RFC: Call for sprints
On Sun, Feb 08, 2015 at 07:55:45AM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ana Guerrero Lopez a...@debian.org [2015-02-07 23:17 +0100]: The draft below is the tentative call for sprints to be send in the next days. Any comments? https://titanpad.com/dc15-cfsprints Could you please keep it on-list? :) Pads are nice when working in editing a document at the same time, but not so nice for email discussion. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Teams: let's hear your budget needs for DC15
On Fri, Feb 06, 2015 at 09:29:07PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ana Guerrero Lopez a...@ekaia.org [2015-02-06 15:41 +0100]: From the content team: budget for inviting speakers. I have found in the budget.ods interesting speakers that I assume is for this (and probably should rename). We need to decide if we're going to spend money on this or not, so we can process the requests we have received. Yes and yes. I am very happy to hear your suggestions. The name interesting speakers is indeed unfortunate, and I've change it to invited speakers in my local copy already. That said, please don't commit changes to that file since I am actively working on it and it sucks to commit after every save and it's not possible to merge stuff. About amounts, I think it would be really useful if we came up with a sort of informed average of how much it is to fly someone in from Europe, the US, maybe Asia and even Pacific, just to get an idea, and then we could say that our budget was e.g. 1×Asia+1×US+3×Europe or so and fill that. Yeah, amounts are tricky. Let's say 2500 EUR for *travelling* alone. This allow 1 european and 1 usian guest comfortably and allows the possibility of somebody from australasia (no suggestions of somebody from there so far). This doesn't meant we're going to use all the money, of course. I have not idea how much money would be the room+food, but I think it's a minor expense. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] busaries question about speakers
Hi, Quick question: should people with accepted talks in the official track assume they will get sponsored food+room if they ask for it? Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] moving debconf-discuss@ to lists.d.o?
Hi everybody, What about to move debconf-discuss to lists.d.o NOW? No email has been sent to debconf-discuss@ in the current year. We could ask the listmasters to open the new list in lists.d.o and start using that list now we're starting a new cycle (before debconf registration opens where we'll encourage people to subscribe to the new mailing list) and migrate the list archives in the next months. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] RFC: Call for sprints
Hi, The draft below is the tentative call for sprints to be send in the next days. Any comments? --- Call For Sprints during DebCamp and DebConf Would you team like to have a sprint but organizing it is too much hassle? Are you looking for more people to join your project but you don't know how to reach them? The DebConf organization team is happy to announce that this August in Heidelberg, Germany, we are going to be hosting sprints for different teams and projects inside Debian, and yours can be one of them. The logistics for room, food and stay are already solved, you just have to come up with the sprint topic, tasks and goals. DebCamp will take place few days before DebConf (August 10th to 14th), and is particularly suitable for sprints held by existing teams, that want to benefit from being able to work all together on a common goal and try to achieve that during those days. It can also be a great opportunity for other interested people to become involved with a new team or project. DebConf itself (August 15th to August 22nd) will be filled with talks and other activities, but there can also be space there for sprints that would benefit from having the larger Debian community at hand, being a point of entry for new team members, and a great way to get results from occasional contributors. If you or your team are interested in hosting a sprint, please start by creating a wiki page that includes the topic, tasks and goals of the sprint, the expected duration (one day? three days?), and a space for prospective participants to sign up. Then send the sprint proposal to debconf-discuss@ The content team will help with the shaping of the proposals, as well as with the coordination of spaces, dates, and participants. Please, do it before April 30th. Please take into account that the space is limited, so sprints will be scheduled on a first-come first-served basis. Participation in the sprints will serve as a DebCamp workplan for those that request food and accommodation sponsorship at the time of their DebConf registration. Looking forward to hearing about your sprints! The DebConf Content team. --- ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Teams: let's hear your budget needs for DC15
On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 11:33:07PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: Dear teams, and I guess specifically you leaders… We are now approaching the time when the budget for DC15 needs to be prepared and approved. Therefore, it would be really useful if you could spend a bit of time thinking about what you'll need, so that we can take that into account. We're fully aware that budgeting involves rough estimates, so don't panic if you don't know. Instead, rather than providing us with a single figure, feel free to be as verbose as you want, which will help later anyway. Just provide something! Obviously, this is also not a promise that you'll get what you're asking for, but if you don't ask for it, it's pretty unlikely you'll get it. So: if you can imagine needing money to do your job for DC15 (sponsorship is explicitly excluded at this stage), then please write in. FWIW, my current budget scratchpad is here: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debconf-data/dc15.git;a=blob;hb=HEAD;f=budget/budget.ods Note that nothing in there makes any statement about how we will use our money. This is work-in-progress, and if you have opinions or questions, let's hear them. Hi, From the content team: budget for inviting speakers. I have found in the budget.ods interesting speakers that I assume is for this (and probably should rename). We need to decide if we're going to spend money on this or not, so we can process the requests we have received. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] procedure to suggest guest speakers
Hi folks, Some of you asked how to invite guest speakers and some even sent quick emails suggesting speakers. We have updated the wiki with the procedure to suggest guest speakers: https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Teams/Content/InvitingSpeakers Please, do not read this email as a call to suggest your favorite person to talk at DebConf. Rather if you know somebody who for some reason would be great to invite to talk at DebConf, follow the linked procedure. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Q for Cape Town bid: attendees safety outside the venue
On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 09:26:08AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: Moray Allan dijo [Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 05:34:40PM +0100]: Still, we haven't completely avoided problems; I remember a few people having bad experiences in Managua, for example, mostly when they were obviously carrying expensive phones or laptops as is rather normal for DebConf attendees (whatever advice we give). FWIW, I have been robbed twice in my life: Once in Mexico City, in 1997 (of course, given I've been here ~95% of my life, this probability is high), and once in Paris, en route to Bosnia (and being on the same metro with Ben and Nattie... And, of course, failing to pay attention to the boring announcements in five languages to stay aware because pickpocketers are quick... Pickpocketing is not the problem. You'll find that in every big city. The main concern for people is being mugged with some degree of violence. While you can also get mugged everywhere, the violence rates in some places scare people and it's perfectly understandable. Some people told me they didn't have any problem in Managua at all, but they left the venue early every day to the hotel and then they barely went out during the night. For some, this kills a lot of the debconf fun. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Rough timeline idea for DC15 and the CfP
On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 11:05:11AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote: Heya, For DebConf15, we have been trying to push ahead the schedule a bit if possible. Our main aim with starting fundraising early was so that we could have a shot at confirming travel sponsorships with enough time for people to buy tickets on offer, rather than when prices are already rising. So in order to put something on the plate for the coordination team foundation meeting as a topic for discussion, I'd like to present a rough plan we've been floating around. This plan has been conceived in a backwards timeline order under the following assumptions: - The conference is in August, and cheap airfares are usually widely available until about 3–4 months in advance. - Therefore, in April, it would be good to have bursary decisions. - Which means that registration should ideally open in March - And by that time, we would like to have at least some events/talks announced for people to make an informed decision. - Which in turn means the CfP should be sent out in January till mid-February. - And also that the content part of summit needs to be setup by then. For many people, the decision of registering to attend DebConf depends on work and family, and priorities will depend also on the conference offerings. On the other hand registering blindly for DebConf is being done by some of the regulars (because event offerings aren't top priority anyway), but this probably doesn't apply to the majority. IIRC, in summit you need to register for attending the conference before sending an event. So registration must definitively be open before the CFP. Closing the CFP in mid-february will be bad because plenty of people won't know if they are attending debconf or not yet and they won't submit talks. On the other side, you will have plenty of talks submittions that will need to be cancelled because people won't attend the conference. So you would be announcing stuff that might happen or not ... Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] results from the cfp from the content team
On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 02:28:20PM +, jathan wrote: Hello. An apology for not having seen that Ana email and failing to respond in time. Sin problemas Jonathan. Welcome to the content team! Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] results from the cfp from the content team
Hi, Thank you to everybody who replied the call to join the content team. This is how things stand right now. From last year's team: - Tiago Bortoletto Vaz (tiago) - Tássia Camões Araújo (tassia) - Martín Ferrari (tincho) - Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg) - René Mayorga (rmayorga) - Gunnar Wolf (gwolf) - Ana Guerrero López (ana) Everybody will continue except Daniel. From the chair's canvassing email and my call for help, I got the following people interested: - Michael Banck (mbanck) - Ana Carolina Comandulli (caroll) - Margarita Manterola (marga) - Martin F. Krafft (madduck) - Maximiliano Curia (maxy) - Rafael Rivas tato - Santiago Ruano Rincón santiago - jathan I never got a reply from an email I sent to jathan to know their name and if they has attended any debconf, so I'm not taking them into account. Right now, accepting everybody we would be 5 people from last year and 7 new = 12 and I was aiming to something like 10 people. The content team is probably the team whose work is more independant from the venue itself, so maybe we should prioritize here 'global people' over 'local team' and keep only 2 people out of 10 from the 'local team'. Last year, there wasn't any local in the talks team and it worked fine, but I think it's good to have at least one person. I would like to ask marga, mbanck, maxy and madduck to discuss between them the responsabilities every of them have already and choose the two people will stay in the content team. Thank you, Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] The talks team is recruiting
Hi everybody, The talks team is recruiting! This is a good team for all those people who are lurking and do not know how to start helping. It's better if you have attended to Debconf already, but it is not a hard condition. Please, send an email before the end of November if you would like to join. Even if the call for events won't be sent in a several months, we have some things we should start discussing already. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] The *content* team is recruiting
Hi everybody (again) The content team is recruiting! This is a good team for all those people who are lurking and do not know how to start helping. It's better if you have attended to Debconf already, but it is not a hard condition. Please, send an email before the end of November if you would like to join. Even if the call for events won't be sent in a several months, we have some things we should start discussing already. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Proposal for bits.debian.org about sponsors for DC15
On Sat, Nov 08, 2014 at 01:34:29PM +0100, Laura Arjona Reina wrote: Hi On 8 de noviembre de 2014 07:48:10 GMT+01:00, martin f krafft madd...@debconf.org wrote: also sprach Laura Arjona Reina larj...@larjona.net [2014-11-07 15:14 +0100]: The updated proposal is in the same place: http://whiteboard.debian.net/bits_blogpost_sponsors_dc15_1.wb Great. Let's get this reviewed and push it out on Monday morning — before we get the next two or more sponsors already in the queue. Can you handle this this weekend? My only time slot probably is Sunday morning, 9 - 11:00 UTC. I'll use that time to send the text or patch or whatever to Ana + publicity. If you have reviews/changes, please do them before Sunday. Hi Laura, I had a quick chat with madduck today in #-publicity when he asked feedback about publishing this tomorrow Sunday or Monday. I'm fine with publishing on Monday, but there a couple of points I consider important: Sunday is the worst possible day to publish something because more people away from Internet and in Monday they read everything quickly. Also, Tuesday is a holiday in some countries (e.g. USA, Belgium, France) so if we do it on Thursday we will have a more wider network effect. If you want to publish another post in the future thanking future sponsors, it will be in at least in a couple of months, so it's probably a good idea update the post with all the last minute sponsors or it will take some time until you thank them. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] debconf 15 opening weekened
On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 07:40:52PM +0200, Margarita Manterola wrote: Hi, On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Ana Guerrero Lopez a...@debian.org wrote: In the website in important dates, it says that the 15-16 August is the opening weekened (geared to the public) and those appears also as DebConf days. It seems like this has been decided already. Before jumping to conclusions, could you please explain what does this exactly mean? This is something that has been mentioned several times in several different meetings, although it might be that it was not discussed on-list up to now. It is inspired on the DebianDay event that has taken place several times in the past (although not in DC14 nor DC13), but with a twist. The Open Weekend is part of DebConf, but given geographical proximity to other cities, we figured that quite a lot more people would choose to attend on that weekend alone. This includes particularly people that are not as involved in Debian as the usual Debian contributors, who will be interested enough to spend the weekend but not the whole week. Taking this into account, the idea was to schedule a broader set of events on that weekend (which also includes Debian's birthday) and invite the general public to join us. Broader events does not mean introductory level talks (i.e. the typical DebianDay schedule), but rather things like the keynotes that we had this year, the DPL report, talks about cross-project affecting tools, lightning talks, workshops/tutorials, keysigning, etc. The goal would be to select the talks that are more suitable to a broader audience and schedule them during that weekend, whereas more specific/internal talks (like team BOFs for example) would be scheduled during the week. This shouldn't influence talk selection at all, just scheduling. For the sake of completion, I must say that in parallel with the official talks, there was some interest in having some introductory level workshops, but this has not been agreed, and personally I'm not sure if we actually want it, and if we do which format it should take. Hi, Thank you for the reply, I wanted to know exactly what the localteam had in mind before commenting on it. I'm not a big fan of the DebianDay because after trying different formulas, it never hasn't been worth the effort. We have already tried the idea of putting the more broadr events during the debianday, we did this at least at dc10. I also think that despite Heidelberg being close to other cities won't work -as happened in previous years - due it being in the middle of the summer holidays and therefore people just having other plans. In case, it is not clear, I think we could pretty much skip this, but it seems the localteam really wants to do something targetted to users that weekend and you haven't fully defined yet what to do, so let me do a proposal for something really different that was already more or less hinter in your last paragraph: What about doing a users minidebconf? What I mean with this: - having the event in parallel to DebConf. (dedicating a room to this sub-event for two days.) - the talks are really adapted for users to get started in Debian. So it's totally independent of debconf's talks schedule and call for talks(*) - if you put users in the name, it will sound more welcoming to users to attend. Debian's development conference is somehow scary for people. And of course, be clear that users are always invited to attend any Debconf talk, just we had a weekend with talks more adapted to them. (*) Personally this is the only part that bothers me the most about the debconf open weekend. I don't like the idea of putting all the important events in the first weekend. It's nicer distributing them through the week and it hurts less to people having to miss the first debconf weekend. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf subteams list
Hi, On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 12:35:11AM +0100, Moray Allan wrote: During the workgroup sessions at DebConf, among other points we agreed that we would form clearer subteams for related tasks, and clarify subteam responsibilities. These subteams would group together related tasks, while avoiding overlapping roles between subteams to simplify decision-making processes. We agreed that all “global” team members should belong to a subteam. (See https://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebconfOrganizationWorkingGroup#Meeting_.234:_August_30th_2014 for an outline of the discussion ) First of all, I fully agree we need to group teams and organize tasks better. But I have the impression that there is the idea that having very few big teams is going to solve some of the problem we had from having a myriad of small teams. My comments on the teams: Here is an initial draft possible subteam list for further discussion and modification: - Content: schedule scheme, CFP, talk/session selection and scheduling, inviting guest speakers, anything related to the content of the conference If the localteam wants to have a Debian day or similar, related task need to be included in this team. - Facilities: accommodation, food, venue negotiations and venue arrangements, including for social events: cheese and wine, formal dinner, day trip, and any other semi-formal gathering OK - Infrastructure: sysadmin (within DSA as well as debconf.org services, website and summit included), on-site network and videoteam On-site network should be an independent team coordinating with facilities and video team. And IMHO, also video team should be independent. - Finance: fundraising (intersecting with wider Debian fundraising team), budget agreement, accounting, bursaries This is a strange grouping for me too. Bursaries should be independent. Budget requires of some work in the beginning that doesn't necessarily need a team. Once the budget is done and approved, it's a task of the chairs to make changes or move money from one item to another. It doesn't need to be included in finance but it definitively need to be grouped with accounting. Then fundraising should be another independent team too where everybody is welcome to help. - Participant assistance: frontdesk, registration, visa, volunteer recruitment during conference period, answering general requests from participants and volunteers. This one also groups plenty of small things. Frontdesk is a independent team that only works during DebConf. Registration includes visa and also room accommodation. I'm not sure what volunteer recruitment during conference period is but any of the ideas I have fits with the other tasks. - Coordination: keeping track of overall timelines (though each subteam should also be doing this), poker role, watch for problems in subteams -- this team would include the DebConf chairs as members Isn't this the work of the chairs? They can get more people helping with this and make a coordination team, sure. Notes [...] - Each subteam would effectively have its own subteams within it (each subteam can organise itself as it wishes) -- no one can be forced to work on tasks they're not interested in, and within each subteam we would need people to lead on specific tasks. But we agreed in the workgroup sessions that we need a more compact list of first-level subteams than at present (5±2?). If you are OK having subteams working as they want, what's the point of forcing them to be in a bigger team? What matter is this team working well, the information is transmitted from year to year, the team interacts with the other teams and the team has a clear lead. - Fundraising should ideally happen through a shared Debian team, but we still need some DebConf people to track it ... and probably need a continuing input of DebConf people to work hard to make it happen. At the same time, the people who are thinking about DebConf fundraising are usually the ones who have the best idea about how we should be budgeting, so it makes sense to put these tasks together in a subteam. I disagree with this. You can be good at interacting with sponsors and have not idea how DebConf uses their money. And the opposite. - There is some argument in favour of putting the video team as a first level subteam. But this year we had trouble since its network/infrastructure needs weren't known and taken into account in time, so it perhaps makes sense to put it into a subteam which will aggregate a list of our hardware/network needs in advance of the conference period. As said above, I think video team should be independent from infrastructure. This team already includes the hardware and video team infrastructure part tasks that should be coordinated very well, but also has plenty of volunteers that don't help with the above tasks. With other big tasks being coordinating all the on-site volunteers. Open questions - What tasks
[Debconf-team] debconf 15 opening weekened
Hi, In the website in important dates, it says that the 15-16 August is the opening weekened (geared to the public) and those appears also as DebConf days. It seems like this has been decided already. Before jumping to conclusions, could you please explain what does this exactly mean? Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] Report from the talks team
Hi everybody, This is a quick summary of how the talks team worked this year. This mail only describes the talk selection process and scheduling. The scheduling of the ad-hoc talks was done by Michael Banck so we'll let him comment on this regard. Also, some personal comments from members of the talk team extending some of the points might follow. === Overview === The talks team had a slow start because we needed to adapt the new conference management system. Despite this, it was all fine because we did the talk selection quite fast. The deadline for talks submission was July 7, we published the accepted talks on July 19 and the final schedule on August 3. We received 115 event submissions and we only had space for a maximum of ~ 84 or so. Still we needed to accept less events and keep some space for rescheduling and last minute talks. We accepted 80 events. We published a post about this: http://blog.debconf.org/blog/2014/07/21#talks-review-finish The period to submit events was opened for 4 weeks. The first two weeks were very slow and some of us were concerned about not getting a lot of events. However, it's true that plenty of people wait until last minute, specially after the last reminder. Instead of just sending plain reminders, we accepted some talks and published an announcement. This worked well, but we will never know if it was because of the reminder or because people got inspired. We sent a last reminder 3 days before the deadline and we got a bunch of submissions after this. Something like a 30% of the submissions came in the last days. We think this was because of the deadline and because the conference dates were close and people have started making plans. == Talk selection process == We didn't use summit to do the talk selection. We used a different system: people in the committee checked a CSV dump with the list of talks individually and only marked those talks they thought that shouldn't be accepted or needed some discussion before being accepted. Then we assembled the data of all the members in one spreadsheet. The talks without any mark were directly accepted. Finally, we had a 2.5 hour IRC meeting, where we discussed all the talks that some member of the team had already marked to discuss and we discussed them one by one. We realized that we have marked as accepted more than 80 talks and therefore we need to cut down. Post meeting, by email, we discussed which talks were candidates to reject or merge. == Tracks == Similar to previous DebConfs, we associated some thematically-related talks together into tracks. We started with some tracks used by previous DebConfs, and we also created new tracks once we found more than 3 different talks on a similar topic. We also encouraged people interested in a topic to submit their tracks. When scheduling, we tried to have all the talks of a track scheduled the same day, except in the case where we have to put a talk in another day due to other constrains. This helped some attendees organize their participation in the conference, However, some people mentioned that spreading the associated sessions throughout would have worked better for them and avoided thematic burnout. == Scheduling == The first draft of the schedule was done taking into account the arrival/departure date of the speakers, then it was scheduled based on tracks, one track cover a full session of several related talks, empty space was important, some gaps were intentional as noted before. Later on, we moved some talks based on the feedback of the speaker and taking into account the size of the rooms. Some live rescheduling was performed during the conference, usually to address the capacity of the rooms. We didn't have an exact number of expected attendees per talk, but we could estimate based on the summit's information of the talk. == Conclusions == * We must find a way to make submitters to make better talks descriptions. Bad or incomplete talks description made to waste a lot of time to both the talks team and attendees. * Publishing the list of accepted talks ahead and taking the time to schedule seems to be a good idea. There are plenty of people making travel plans at the last minute and allows last minute additions. * To take better advantage of Summit's interface, probably we should provide the list of talks still without scheduling, and wait for people to fill in their talk interests and use this data for better scheduling. * Doing the talks selection off-line without having to rely in the web interface but still with all the data about the talk, seemed to work fine. But we might want to study betters way to implement this that a big CSV dump. * We don't know if accepting some talks ahead was good for encouraging events submission or not, but it created some buzz around the conference. It also makes some of us wonder if there was a skew of the criteria used to select the talks accepted before the deadline and if this was a sensible bias or not.
Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf governance discussion
On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 07:56:07AM -0700, Patty Langasek wrote: On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 02:32:30PM +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: lots of snipping The above was a long paragraph to state that I currently prefer madduck's proposal to yours. Agreed. Taking our comments when we're separated isn't going to resolve anything. And, if anything, fully encourages me to make sure I have lunch with madduck and OdyX to prepare that both dinners can drive a consistent message, which is probably exactly what you don't want, and exactly what I will do (and I fully admit I'll do it). How is that negative? Right now I see something like 10 different messages, if we have a meeting and there is only 3 different messages, it's an improvement... ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf governance discussion
On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 10:36:11AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 05:42:26PM +0200, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 07:56:07AM -0700, Patty Langasek wrote: On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 02:32:30PM +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: lots of snipping The above was a long paragraph to state that I currently prefer madduck's proposal to yours. Agreed. Taking our comments when we're separated isn't going to resolve anything. And, if anything, fully encourages me to make sure I have lunch with madduck and OdyX to prepare that both dinners can drive a consistent message, which is probably exactly what you don't want, and exactly what I will do (and I fully admit I'll do it). How is that negative? Right now I see something like 10 different messages, if we have a meeting and there is only 3 different messages, it's an improvement... Because consensus of the part is not a proxy for consensus of the whole, and dividing the groups arbitrarily by local team distorts the conversation. Siloing of local teams is a persistent problem within DebConf organization, which has reached an all-time high this year with people telling me the local team should be planning to take care of list of functions that are completely invisible to anyone following debconf-team and which have historically been driven by a team of long-term domain experts. It's not healthy to have on the one hand people saying there is no local or global team, just the team, and on the other hand saying you'd better find local volunteers for these things that have nothing to do with the conference's location or else DebConf won't happen. So no, I don't intend to participate in any plan that involves separating the teams by year to have separate conversations. It's hard enough to improve the institutional continuity of DebConf year over year due to the nature of the work and the burnout factor; we don't need to make it worse by quarantining the teams for such an important discussion topic. I feel like we're discussing two totally different issues here O_o If you're against the chairs talking with people grouping them by debconf year or global team, suggest something else. I understond that the goal here is taking the time to hear what everybody has to say about the problems and possible solutions. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Introduction for newcomers talk?
Hi! On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 09:14:41PM -0700, Patty Langasek wrote: On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 03:33:28PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: I don't think that's at all what was said. The talks team are not, TTBOMK, the ones giving the opening talk, and this feedback that this is something that should be taken care of during the opening talk was not shared with the wider debconf team. If we *are* trying to squeeze this into the opening talk, I'd much rather bring you guys on stage for that part and let you handle it. Agreed. I was not informed this was required to be part of the opening presentation, nor have I seen it included in the welcome talk previously. Would you guys care to present during the welcome talk/opening ceremonies or would you like me to appeal to the Talks team on your behalf as a presenter who is not prepared for this topic? You shouldn't included anything in the opening talk you weren't planning to. I remember the description of the first-timers event wasn't very clear to some of us during the discussion. Becase we welf that some of the things pointed there overlap with the opening talk. Or that's what some of us understood from the event description: From https://summit.debconf.org/debconf14/meeting/49/debconf-first-timers-session/: Tell first-comers about DebConf and how it works, give some info and some anecdotes, tell them how they can help. I can/will flesh this out as soon as the event is scheduled. Our reject message was meant to have the submitter coordinating with the team to avoid duplicating topics. We rejected the talk for the main schedule but we expected this to be schedule as ad-hoc. I don't understand why the submitter waited one month to discuss this since the reject messages were sent. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Budget woes
On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 08:33:30PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: - Water bottles. Sturdy, reusable aluminum water bottles - branded with the Debian logo, of course! - would be a nice perk to send people home with, that would be useful during the conference too. (And they would definitely come in handy for people on the day trip.) They are also something that we could order extra of - I'm *sure* that people would be interested in buying extras. I would love the bottles. Would they have to carry sponsors logos?? ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] renting extra room for ad-hoc talks.
Hi everybody, The venue has some small rooms we are not renting and our budget is looking healthy, so we can discuss the possibility of renting an extra small room (10-20 seats) for ad-hoc events some of the days. Currently the only time available for ad-hoc talks is: - After dinner, from 20:00 to 22:00, our three talks room, during the days August 24-26 and 28-30. (A total of 6 days) - The afternoon of August 25 from 13:30 to 18:00 (the three talks room) - The morning of August 28 from 10:00 to 12:00 (the three talks room) It's worth nothing that there is a park next to the venue, there's the balcony, there are classrooms in the dorms (that serve also as night hacklabs) and there is also the lounge area. Besides the two hacklabs, of course. It's also true all some of those spaces are public and also noisy, so having a meeting room is nice. The small rooms cost 240USD/day to rent. Do you think we need more ad-hoc space? Do you think renting this room for a few days will contribute to a better debconf? If you think we should rent it, how many days? Ana PS: this email is not for or against the proposal. I don't have a strong opinion for or against. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] confirmation of room changes; details on talk room capacities
Hi, On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 02:19:37PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: Do we (and I guess in particular, the talks team) believe that these capacities will meet our needs? If not, please let me know what you believe we should do. Replying to this question with more detail now. For reference, the booking information, with nominal seating capacities, is here: http://www.pdx.edu/conferences/sites/www.pdx.edu.conferences/files/Booking%20information%20for%20external%20clients_1.pdf Possible reconfigurations might include adding a third talk room on the second floor at a medium space rate (probably room 298 if it's available, with a capacity of ~70), then either combining 327 and 328 as a single talk room with capacity of ~150 and keeping 329 with capacity of 40, or combining 329 and 329 for a capacity of ~70 and keeping 327 with capacity of 84. Either of these configurations would be a net addition of one large room. According to the latest confirmation from PSU, this would in fact still keep us within the overall budget for the venue. For regular days without plenaries we would need something like: - big room 120-150 seats - medium room: 80-100 seats - small room: 40-50 seats The room configuration that seems to get closer to this is: - merge 327 with 328 as our big room (pdf says 168 seats as auditorium) - keep 329 as it is, so it is our small room (pdf says 40 seats as auditorium) - rent 298 or 294 as medium room. Room 298 as auditorium fits 80 and room 294 fits 100. They're both listed with the same price, so I'd go for the bigger one if available. Do you need something else from the talks team? Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] confirmation of room changes; details on talk room capacities
On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 06:27:59PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote: On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 10:06:57PM +, René Mayorga wrote: On Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 02:19:37PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: Hi all, Hi, So the two questions are: - Do we need the additional seating capacity in the talk rooms? (Talks - team) Actually, we mention this early in the team, current capacity is not proportional to the amount of people attending (250?). Yeah, we discussed that the room size were in the limit of acceptable capacity, with the new capacities, they're small. If we have budget we should try to rent bigger rooms. I don't expect all attendees to be always attending talks but I do expect some talks gather 150 attendees easily. Booking 298 will help to sort it out later, now that our main(327) room have less capacity than we expected. This needs to be sorted now, not later. I need to give PSU facilities details in advance of the room configurations we require. Agreed. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [Debconf-discuss] Final list of accepted talks
On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 11:29:43AM +0100, Neil McGovern wrote: Hi Ana, Sounds like good material for a press release. Should I prepare one? I'll do a blog post when the schedule is ready. Ana On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 08:45:08PM +0200, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: Below is the list of accepted talks that will be scheduled in the next days. Every talk has a slot of 45m except the Live demos event and the Looking back on a Debian Summer of Code talk (it contains 4 presentations by GSoC students). Everybody should have gotten an email (in reality, a duplicated email) about the status of their talk. Please, contact the submitter directly if you want to have a Lightning Talk or a Live Demo. The talks committee could have overlooked some talk. If this is the case, please reach us at ta...@debconf.org -Talk Submitter -Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA Neil Williams -A glimpse into a systemd future Josh Triplett -ACC for abi breaks Dimitri Ledkov -Ad-hoc cross-builds and multi-buildsIan Jackson -Adding ppc64el in DebianBreno Leitao -Auditors Trademark teams merged BOF Brian Gupta -Bits from the DPL Lucas Nussbaum -bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! Don Armstrong -Closing ceremonyGunnar Wolf -Coming of Age: My Life with Debian Christine Spang -DC16 proposals Gunnar Wolf -debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project Antonio Terceiro -DebConf volunteer recruitment session Moray Allan -DebConf15 in Heidelberg Martin Krafft -debdry - Debian Don't Repeat Yourself Enrico Zini -Debian and the FSF working together to advance free softwareJohn Sullivan -Debian cloud images Juerg Haefliger -Debian Contributors, one year later Enrico Zini -Debian derivatives discussion Paul Wise -Debian Haskell Group BoFJoey Hess -Debian in the Dark Ages of Free Software Stefano Zacchiroli -Debian installer and CD BoF Steve McIntyre -Debian Java Packaging BoF Matthew Vernon -Debian Long Term SupportHolger Levsen -Debian Ruby BoF Antonio Terceiro -Debsources: powering sources.debian.net Stefano Zacchiroli -dgit - treat the archive as a git remoteIan Jackson -Docker + Debian = ♥ Paul Tagliamonte -DSA Team round table/BoFMartin Zobel-Helas -Embedded ARM development in Debian Agustin Henze -Finding solutions for reproducible builds Jérémy Bobbio -GnuPG in Debian BoF Daniel Gillmor -GRUB, ancient and modernColin Watson -Hacking on apt for fun and profit Michael Vogt -hOpenPGP - an implementation of RFC 4880 in Haskell Clint Adams -Infrastructure updates - can we change anything in less than 2 years? Wookey -introduction to pybuild and Python packagingPiotr Ożarowski -Jessie (bits from the release team) Julien Cristau -Lightning Talks Nattie Mayer-Hutchings -Live Demos Nattie Mayer-Hutchings -Looking back on a Debian Summer of Code Nicolas Dandrimont -LSB for Debian BoF Didier Raboud -Making Debian excellent in Google's cloud Jimmy Kaplowitz -Meet the Technical CommitteeBdale Garbee -MIA Team BoFRené Mauricio Mayorga -MIPS BoF Aurelien
[Debconf-team] Final list of accepted talks
Hi everybody, Below is the list of accepted talks that will be scheduled in the next days. Every talk has a slot of 45m except the Live demos event and the Looking back on a Debian Summer of Code talk (it contains 4 presentations by GSoC students). Everybody should have gotten an email (in reality, a duplicated email) about the status of their talk. Please, contact the submitter directly if you want to have a Lightning Talk or a Live Demo. The talks committee could have overlooked some talk. If this is the case, please reach us at ta...@debconf.org -TalkSubmitter -Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA Neil Williams -A glimpse into a systemd future Josh Triplett -ACC for abi breaks Dimitri Ledkov -Ad-hoc cross-builds and multi-buildsIan Jackson -Adding ppc64el in DebianBreno Leitao -Auditors Trademark teams merged BOF Brian Gupta -Bits from the DPL Lucas Nussbaum -bugs.debian.org -- Database Ho! Don Armstrong -Closing ceremonyGunnar Wolf -Coming of Age: My Life with Debian Christine Spang -DC16 proposals Gunnar Wolf -debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project Antonio Terceiro -DebConf volunteer recruitment session Moray Allan -DebConf15 in Heidelberg Martin Krafft -debdry - Debian Don't Repeat Yourself Enrico Zini -Debian and the FSF working together to advance free softwareJohn Sullivan -Debian cloud images Juerg Haefliger -Debian Contributors, one year later Enrico Zini -Debian derivatives discussion Paul Wise -Debian Haskell Group BoFJoey Hess -Debian in the Dark Ages of Free SoftwareStefano Zacchiroli -Debian installer and CD BoF Steve McIntyre -Debian Java Packaging BoF Matthew Vernon -Debian Long Term SupportHolger Levsen -Debian Ruby BoF Antonio Terceiro -Debsources: powering sources.debian.net Stefano Zacchiroli -dgit - treat the archive as a git remoteIan Jackson -Docker + Debian = ♥ Paul Tagliamonte -DSA Team round table/BoFMartin Zobel-Helas -Embedded ARM development in Debian Agustin Henze -Finding solutions for reproducible builds Jérémy Bobbio -GnuPG in Debian BoF Daniel Gillmor -GRUB, ancient and modernColin Watson -Hacking on apt for fun and profit Michael Vogt -hOpenPGP - an implementation of RFC 4880 in Haskell Clint Adams -Infrastructure updates - can we change anything in less than 2 years? Wookey -introduction to pybuild and Python packagingPiotr Ożarowski -Jessie (bits from the release team) Julien Cristau -Lightning Talks Nattie Mayer-Hutchings -Live Demos Nattie Mayer-Hutchings -Looking back on a Debian Summer of Code Nicolas Dandrimont -LSB for Debian BoF Didier Raboud -Making Debian excellent in Google's cloud Jimmy Kaplowitz -Meet the Technical CommitteeBdale Garbee -MIA Team BoFRené Mauricio Mayorga -MIPS BoFAurelien Jarno -New Network Interface Manager for Debian: ifupdown2 Roopa Prabhu -One year of fedmsg in DebianNicolas Dandrimont -OpenStack update packaging experience sharing Thomas Goirand -Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian Francois Marier -Power Tuning Linux: A Case StudyAlexandra Yates -Putting some salt in your Debian systems
Re: [Debconf-team] Final schedule structure - review
On Wed, Jul 02, 2014 at 10:06:51AM +, René Mayorga wrote: [2] http://people.debian.org/~rmayorga/schedule-dc14.png If you look at the above image, you'll see we can schedule 55 official talks and 26 ad-hoc talks. We have gotten about 100 talks proposals which mean we will need to reject many good proposals. We can do this or: a) Reassign some ad-hoc space to official talks. The result is almost the same because some rejected talks would be scheduled as a ad-hoc, it'd demotivate speakers and we'd end with virtually no ad-hoc space. b) add some more talk time on Saturdays and Sunday Mornings c) add more talks on Monday 25 d) add more talks on Thursday 28 e) add talks some days after lunch. (5 days max) Opinions? Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] Possible talks slots with the chosen schedule
Hi, Based on the schedule accepted in yesterday's meeting [0]. I have done a rought allocation of slots to see how much talks we can allocate. Every talk-slot is of 1h. I'm assuming we can have 3 slots in the morning and slot in the evening. When we don't have a single room[1], I'm assuming we use 2 rooms for official talks with video and the third room for ad-hoc (or not official) talks without video. Personally, I think we could add another half a day off for hacking or consider having only 2 rooms a couple of days. [0] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20131001.175026.0a50b91b.en.html [1] That's when we use all the rooms combined to have a big one. The talks schedule without times would be like this: - Fri, August 22 - Arrival day. No talks; hacklabs open. - Sat, August 23 - First day of the conference. No talks in the morning; talks scheduled in the evening on a single track. This is 4 talks: the welcome talk and 3 other talks that usually are very popular (e.g. I'd add here the bits from the release team). - Sun, August 24 - Full day of talks. This is the 2 biggest room for official talks (2x7 = 14 slots) and the smallest talk room for 7 ad-hoc events. - Mon, August 25 - Talks in morning only. Afternoon/evening blocked for hack time (and social events? - CW) This is the 2 biggest room for official talks (2x3 = 6 slots) and the smallest talk room for 3 ad-hoc events. - Tue, August 26 - Full day of talks. This is the 2 biggest room for official talks (2x7 = 14 slots) and the smallest talk room for 7 ad-hoc events. - Wed, August 27 - Day Trip. No talks - Thu, August 28 - Talks in the afternoon only. Morning and evening blocked for hack time. This is the 2 biggest room for official talks (2x4 = 8 slots) and the smallest talk room for 4 ad-hoc events. - Fri, August 29 - Full day of talks. This is the 2 biggest room for official talks (2x7 = 14 slots) and the smallest talk room for 7 ad-hoc events. - Sat, August 30 - Full day of talks This is the 2 biggest room for official talks (2x7 = 14 slots) and the smallest talk room for 7 ad-hoc events. - Sun, August 31 - Hack day / departure day. Hacklabs open, no talks scheduled (except the closing talk?), people will start heading home. I'd schedule this day using a single room with: - dc15 talk - dc16 proposals talks - lightining talks (probably a double slot of 2h) - closing talk - Mon, September 1 - People leave. --- Slots count: 23 Aug: 4 slots 24 Aug: 14+7 25 Aug: 6+3 26 Aug: 14+7 27 Aug: 0 28 Aug: 8+4 29 Aug: 14+7 30 Aug: 14+7 31 Aug: undefined (see proposal above) It would be ~74 official talks/bofs and we can have up to 35 ad-hoc events. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Possible talks slots with the chosen schedule
On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 04:51:39PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ana Guerrero Lopez a...@debian.org [2014-06-25 16:23 +0200]: Based on the schedule accepted in yesterday's meeting [0]. I have done a rought allocation of slots to see how much talks we can allocate. Hey Ana, having volunteered to do this yesterday, I also came up with my own plan, which is almost identical to what you came up with, except that it takes into account the modified meal times on weekends: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debconf-data/dc14.git;a=blob;f=time_slots.odt;hb=HEAD Depending on the decision regarding talks before brunch, there are 34 or 36 slots for regular talks. Those should include the lightning talks, DC15 presentation and DC16 ideas, unless people want them folded into the closing ceremony, which I don't think is a good idea. I consider my work on this done, so if you want to take over and make changes, go for it. I don't think we have done the same work. This was a 10m rought calculation to know how much talk space we'll have, you have worked mostly in the timetable side. I have not idea what you mean with 34-36 slots. We have way more talk slots than that, keeping in mind that sometimes we'll use only one room and sometimes three rooms! ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Possible talks slots with the chosen schedule
On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 05:12:23PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: There are 34 slots for talks in the timetable I prepared, not including the opening/closing ceremonies and the DPL talk, which I've fixed for some reason, and including slots after dinner on those days vorlon set would be okay. We have so far no submission of a DPL talk. Why this one has to be the talk after the opening talk :? Are you going to work also on scheduling? I think it should be up to the talks team to now fill those, deciding for each slot how many events should happen at the same time. If there are three rooms available, then this means you can schedule between 34 and 102 events in those slots, plus the two slots before brunch in case we want to use them. Yes, on my email did this calculation a bit more in deep. Are we going to have talks after dinner? this wasn't in vorlon's schedule. People should have some free time. Hope this makes sense. We were using talk slot differently, for you are talks gaps in the timetable where we have talks and for me where the number of talks/bof events we can have. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Possible talks slots with the chosen schedule
On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 04:51:39PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ana Guerrero Lopez a...@debian.org [2014-06-25 16:23 +0200]: Based on the schedule accepted in yesterday's meeting [0]. I have done a rought allocation of slots to see how much talks we can allocate. http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debconf-data/dc14.git;a=blob;f=time_slots.odt;hb=HEAD A proposal timetable moving the 4 evening talks gaps to make the timetable more regular. It also avoids having 2 days with 8 time slots for events. I've added the talks calculation for my initial email too. Ana time_slots_second_proposal.ods Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Possible talks slots with the chosen schedule
On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 10:06:47PM +0200, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 04:51:39PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ana Guerrero Lopez a...@debian.org [2014-06-25 16:23 +0200]: Based on the schedule accepted in yesterday's meeting [0]. I have done a rought allocation of slots to see how much talks we can allocate. http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debconf-data/dc14.git;a=blob;f=time_slots.odt;hb=HEAD A proposal timetable moving the 4 evening talks gaps to make the timetable more regular. It also avoids having 2 days with 8 time slots for events. I've added the talks calculation for my initial email too. I just realised the initial proposal from madduck has allocated the time slots of 45m for talks but they should be 1h even if the talk last 45m. This way, video team can rest, people can change talk rooms, etc. So, it needs to be redone... ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Possible talks slots with the chosen schedule
Hi again, On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 10:34:00PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: You will see that the next event doesn't start until 15 minutes later, so this is accounted for. Sure, remove the evening talk slots if it makes you happy. But you cannot move them to right after brunch where there's a short break until 13:30 to make the timetable more regular. The way you have put the times in your proposal tricked me since visually you tend to interpret every row as the same time (1h). I have no proposals but the current timetable is going to be hard to remember. Also, Steve said there should be not too many talks on Saturday afternoon after the opening. I'm fine with that. So if you don't want evening talk slots, just don't schedule anything there (but leave it up to people to schedule bofs etc!). Nope. The time to schedule bofs and so on that haven't been previously scheduled as official is already defined in the schedule in the ad-hoc slots. This gives a chance for videoteam to record them if they want to. And as you say: Our goal should not be to maximise the number of talks, but their quality. And we couldn't agree more on this. Also, please don't have DC15/DC16 presentations after the closing. I don't even think they need to happen on the last day. DC16 yes, but DC15 can happen any time. But not after the closing. You said you'd like this presentations to be at some moment we only have one room, so I put all of them the last day where we can merge all the rooms on one. I don't think we want to do this more a couple of times during the conference. I have decided I'm not going to volunteer for scheduling. I hope somebody else can give you feedback and good luck to whoever does the scheduling =) ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [rmayo...@debian.org: Summit - Propose a event form fields]
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 09:42:38AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: Forwarding to the list for general consumption. From: René Mayorga rmayo...@debian.org To: vor...@debian.org Cc: ta...@debconf.org Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 09:02:42 -0600 Hi Steve, As we promise to forward you the fields/changes for the talk/event creation form on Summit: + Title ** Mandatory + Description ** Mandatory) + Event type (BoF, Leture, etc) + Track (Optional) + URL - text box, allowing several URLs. + License (list box)* NEW contents: GPLv2/v3 Mozilla Public License (MPL) 3-clause BSD License The Artistic License The MIT License Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) v4.0 Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) v3.0 Other - Please mail ta...@debconf.org + Spec URL *Remove it* + Wiki URL *Remove it* + PAD URL *Remove it* + Participants - not yet decided - We Would also like to change the wording, on the form and links, instead of Propose a Meeting, can we use Propose an Event ? Any news about having this implemented in summit so we, the talks team, can send the Call for events/talks? Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Updated budget for DC14
On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 09:17:41AM -0700, Patty Langasek wrote: On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 03:45:10PM +0100, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 03:35:59PM +0100, Ana Guerrero Lopez wrote: Without taking any position in the recent debate over the use of Debian money to sponsor DebConf, I would even go as far as saying that Debian should always make sure there's a day trip. That's based in your personal experience and preference only. I have seen plenty of people skipping the day trip every year. I know because I was one of them. The good thing is this is something we can measure, and check the numbers the approx. numbers of how many people benefited of the daytrip and how many people benefit of the daytrip in previous years. I meant to say: ...and how many people benefined of the conference dinner in previous years. Being one of the more biased people here in regards to the daytrip (I was Patty, if you read the full quote in my email, this is in the context of budget and daytrip vs conference dinner. Nobody said here the daytrip doesn't have any benefit, just that the conference dinner seems to be something more attendes enjoy. With my point being that it should be given more priority that the daytrip in the budget. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Updated budget for DC14
On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 07:12:32AM +0100, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Lucas Nussbaum lea...@debian.org [2014-03-28 00:23 +0100]: Yes. I wonder about the respective merits of the daytrip vs the conference dinner too. But I'll leave that up to you (the DebConf team). The conference dinner is one thing, but the day trip is IMHO a really important aspect of the conference, at least if our goal is (includes) to enhance personal relationships and get people to know each other better. Without taking any position in the recent debate over the use of Debian money to sponsor DebConf, I would even go as far as saying that Debian should always make sure there's a day trip. That's based in your personal experience and preference only. I have seen plenty of people skipping the day trip every year. I know because I was one of them. The good thing is this is something we can measure, and check the numbers the approx. numbers of how many people benefited of the daytrip and how many people benefit of the daytrip in previous years. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Updates regarding the Swedish bid
On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 01:49:06PM +0100, Martin Bagge / brother wrote: DC17 is not that far away really...or? =) DC16 is closer :) ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Debian Conference
On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 06:42:29PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: I *think* we do not currently have any DDs in your country, but again, we are willing to work with committed user groups. Besides the famous millionaire who shall not be named, who anyway lives in the Isle of Man, I remember Stefano Rivera being south african. I don't think we should reply to this kind of emails, we can organize Debian with a non profit organization but clearly not with a for-profit bussiness. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DC14: parallel activities for families with kids
On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 12:48:26PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ana Guerrero Lopez a...@debian.org [2013.08.24.2110 +0200]: No, please. I don't understand why you're trying to stop this discussion. Because there is no point in talking about the past when the goal is not exclusively to make it better in the future. I would say that's what we're doing. If you feel it isn't the case, you can try re-driving the discussion publically. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] Please create the mailinglist debconf-families
On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 05:13:41PM -0400, Brian Gupta wrote: - Taking this a bit further, I feel that a debconf-families mailing list where families can get to know each other before the conference and start planning playdates, child care, and other family friendly activities would likely be really helpful. (Hopefully with some local orga team members also on the list to answer family oriented questions.) We'd likely want to set this up way in advance, and make sure people knew about it. (Perhaps include the list details when the date of the conference is announced.) Part of the discussion about Debconf with kids should be kept private. So please, create this list, unarchived and with subscription moderated. I think debconf-families is ambiguous and I would prefer debconf-kids or debconf-parents, but I don't really care a lot of about the name. I'm more than happy to help moderating. Thank you. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DC14: parallel activities for families with kids
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 05:38:02PM +0200, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote: Giacomo Catenazzi c...@debian.org writes: This would be simple, but it doesn't seem the most request of families (OTOH CH was special, with no real alternatives for families near the venue). Can we at least please stop this meme now. Each family is different and has their own requrirements. Several families have proven that Le Camp was perfect for them and others have shown that there were nearby alternatives that worked for them. Several families attending don't prove anything, you also have the families that didn't attend because the venue. It's like saying it isn't hard to start contributing to Debian because we welcome every year new DDs. We have had families with children attending DebConf *every* year just plenty of attendees didn't notice in open venues. Because some people are able to afford to have a car and to be hosted somewhere else [*], which costed this year a certain amount because the few possibilities offered in the area, or to pay 960 CHF (from 2*(200+40*7)) to get a 2 person room in the venue, that doesn't mean the venue was perfect for them. When something you do in your free time, stealing time from your family, already adds this extra cost of participation, you just stop participating. [*] orga team was telling families to host themselves out from the venue a few weeks ago. not. Some others might be happy to have other DebConf attendees careing about their children during the day, others probably won't. IMO we should offer a solution that we think will work for most and that actually someone wants to implement. After that families can decide if they like it or not. In this part, I agree. Parents have different standards and expectations about the child care of their children. The orga team should make it easy for parents to self-organize and provide assistance but not directly providing child care. Probably the best is a closed and non-archived list where the parents can make groups (age, language, etc) and find the solution for their children. And about the venue, it doesn't matter where the venue is as long as: - Parents can take their children without extra cost (at least until the children need a bed) and have their needs taken account of in room allocation. - Children who already eat food like adults, can eat with the group. DebConf had been OK with both points above most of the years, sometimes in city (e.g. Bosnia) and sometimes in the middle of nothing (e.g. Mexico). Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DC14: parallel activities for families with kids
On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 07:48:53AM +0200, martin f krafft wrote: may have been. I will now ask the list for private replies. No, please. I don't understand why you're trying to stop this discussion. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Separate room for families
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 04:26:19PM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote: But my main issue WRT hosting families is that... We don't yet know how full will DebConf be, or how Debian people will be distributed. Keep in mind we have relatively few such rooms - And, of course, we should try to prioritize filling those rooms with Debian people who are concerned about not getting their base level of comfort to sleep well during a week of hard work. So, we don't know yet how full will Le Camp be during DebConf, and we also don't know how full will that room category be. It might turn out that we end up with enough room to host you and your family - but that's not yet something we can take for granted. In short, if I were you, I'd look into the Vaumarcus studio options. Of course, others are welcome to comment, and to dissent with me. And you as well, of course. Out of curiosity, what do you understand for a family here? I have discovered recently that the definition of a family varies widely and for some, the concept of family must include children. For others, like me, 2 persons who share their live together are already a family. In previous years, DebConf welcomed families (as in 2 persons) without problems, if this year you are not going to guarantee lodging for developers taking family members until later, this should be clear in registration to avoid people making plans in this regard. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Separate room for families
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 02:16:38PM +0200, Giacomo Catenazzi wrote: On 17.04.2013 12:42, Ana Guerrero wrote: Out of curiosity, what do you understand for a family here? I have discovered recently that the definition of a family varies widely and for some, the concept of family must include children. For others, like me, 2 persons who share their live together are already a family. In previous years, DebConf welcomed families (as in 2 persons) without problems, if this year you are not going to guarantee lodging for developers taking family members until later, this should be clear in registration to avoid people making plans in this regard. Hello Ana, I think that families in this context means: developers with accompanying person(s) (where accompanying not in developer). Good then, I have the same point of view on this. There was a heated discussion about what to answer in the previous mail: should we privilege developers on the limited number of small rooms, or should we be inclusive? As background: since months there are big discussions about the big rooms: Much worries that many developers will not attend DebConf if the only option is a big room. Returning to the real case: the questioner had an alternate sleeping option, so the discussion ended slightly in favor of the first view of DebConf (privilege the developers). But we are in the -team mailing list, so other opinions and arguments in favor of one option or the other one are welcome. Maybe we missed some important arguments. In other words: do you (= -team readers) think that most of the developers want small rooms? Should we privilege the number of developers? I am not going to enter in the discussion about if we should privilege developers in getting lodging first or about how we should distribute the rooms. I can imagine you have discussed at lenght those issues. My concern is the following one: Over the years people have taken to debconf family members, I can remember of people taking their partner, son, daughter, brother or sister. Of course, always paying for them and I would say everybody is OK with this (at least, I am). I'm sure people are planning to do the same this year and in the answer to Raphael I understood this year you don't necessarily will get a sleeping place for your family member(s) even if you pay for it and ask during the registration period. Knowing that are developers who are planning to take family to debconf this year too. The answer to Raphael was understood for me like a only if we have space and the Registration wiki page doesn't say anything about this. In case I didn't explain this well, let me rephrase it in more direct questions: a) Since this year accomodation is limited and when it's full, it's full, it is ok for people who don't care about room size or communal showers to bring their family members and assume it will be fine if they pay? Or do they risk debconf telling them May 15: sorry, debconf overflow and debian contributors get the space first, we don't have enough space for $MEMBER, you are a contributor and can stay in le camp, tell $MEMBER to go somewhere else or go with $MEMBER somewhere else if you want to stay together? b) The same than a) but asking for one of the smaller rooms and be willing to pay in full for it. This would be Raphael if he didn't ask to be sponsored. c) The same than a) but with camping. I think Raphael will go somewhere else anyway because it's cheaper for him (for what he told me by IRC), but please, if the policy with respect family members have changed this year as Gunnar's mail could be read. Then, could you make it very clear in the registration email and in penta when people chooses acompaying or whatever is called this year? HTH, Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Separate room for families
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 02:19:12PM -0400, Brian Gupta wrote: Caveate: Everyone and every family is different, so please just consider this a data point. My opinion (as someone with a wife and 2 kids), feels that for those in a situation where a family with kids wants to travel together to CH for DebConf, then it is probably best to make alternate accommodation arrangements. Although my case is a little different since I currently only plan to make a single day trip to Le Camp, to meet with the other DebConf organizers, I suspect that having my 7 and 9 year olds at DebConf, would likely not lead to happy kids. What we are planning on doing is finding a more central location within an hour or so commute to DebConf, and basically have me commute to DebConf, and I'd leave my wife and kids to explore the region during the day while I am at DebConf, and meet back up with them in the evening. Although this probably differs for each family, (based on age and interests of the family..) I'd guess that even if we didn't have to make the tradeoff of Developers vs Family for accommodation, I'd still recommend the same approach. (IE: When taking family on a business trip, I don't bring them to the business meetings, but leave them to enjoy family-friendly events/attractions in the area.) Of course, I'd have a different view, if the kids were old enough, and looking to get involved in the project. :) If I were attending for more than one day, I'd still still stay in a more central area with my family, leaving them to explore the region, and commute to DebConf on my own, and spend the evenings with my family, but I'd probably be more selective on what kind of commute I am willing to deal with. Summary - I think at this point, our general recommendation for families traveling with children, should be to encourage them to find alternate accommodations, and make this recommendation sooner rather than later, with a list of recommended family friendly accommodation options, and perhaps a list of possible activities. Yeah, as you said every family is different. I agree with you le camp is not a place where you can take kids. Leaving aside that your approach is only possible to wealthy people, *please* could you stop assuming a family is a couple where only the man is interested in Debian and there are children who will be taken care away for the woman? This is not directed to you, I have seem this assumption a few time on this list. We have monoparentals families where the contributor can not leave their children somemwhere else if they want to attend debconf. And also families with two parents who are both contributors and have to take their children to le camp without a choice. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] [DC14] Venezuelan team: questions after reading the bid
Hi, I haven't read the first answers to other questions (I didn't want to get influenced) so sorry in advance for the overlap. * List of organizers The wikipage lists a bunch of people who would be organizing DebConf14. I know a few names there, but some of the people listed as Debian contributors can't be found in Debian lists further than 2 or 3 mails renaming or sending an ITA/ITP. And I have seen only activity from a few of the names in what seems to be your coordination list https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/debian-ve Could you please give more information of the real number of people involved in organizing and also, their involvement in Debian? Not that people need to be involved deeply in Debian, but knowing that they have interest in Debian makes it more understandable why they want to contribute by helping with DebConf. * Choice of city Could you elaborate more about Puerto la Cruz? Are we going there during high season? What's the availability of services such as restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies? You mention mayor malls at 5-10min (walking) from the venue. (sic) Could you please specify this distance in meters? What can people expect to find in such malls? * Airport The Simón Bolívar International Airport looks very well communicated and I would expect most of the attendees arriving there. You mention that you can take from there a bus to go to Puerto la Cruz, does this mean you can take the bus directly in the airport? If not, how are you supposed to go to the place where you would take the bus? What is the frequency of buses going from this airport or the city nearby (I assume Caracas) to Puerto la Cruz? Prices? How safe is this trip for foreigners (most of whom don't speak Spanish)? [I know you mention renting buses to go from the airport to the venue, but not everybody will arrive at the same time and the buses might not work out for plenty of reasons like budget constraints ] * Visas I'm assuming we would send invitation letters to known people who want to attend DebConf as we do every year. Can we count with the help of somebody specialized in visas and/or from the Government to help us in some of the difficult cases? * Money handling Can we pay some stuff directly from foreign countries? e.g. hotel. How would we handle other money on site? Is there already an association that can do this, do we need to create a new one? (I know you did some of this stuff in a past Fedora event, so the experience gathered there is very valuable, though it looks like that was much smaller) * Accommodation I find the hotel quite expensive (probably also the hotel standards are very high, it is shown with 5 stars). With the government discount, the price is more acceptable but I still do wonder if there is the possibility of going to a cheaper hotel? E.g. a hotel with 3 stars would be quite good already :) I have seen the option b) is another hotel with the same characteristics (5 stars) and from the same chain. What could happen preventing us from going to the first hotel? I mean, if we don't get a good deal with the first hotel, it is unlikely we'll get it with the second hotel. Given that you mention Puerto la Cruz is an academic city, is there any possibility of having the venue in one of those universities and use their student residences for housing? * One key per room Asking how many keys are provided for each room might look like a stupid question but it has been a source of problems in the past. People sharing a room in DebConf are rarely spending the day together so sharing the key doesn't work very well. Do we would have for sure only one single key? * Children You encourage developers into taking children to the conference mentioning you plan to provide activities for people taking children, that's great. Since it is impossible to have activities all day for all ages. Does the hotel or some other place in the city provide childcare services? (At a fee, of course) * Food You mention the food would be mostly Traditional venezuelan food. For some of us that doesn't mean a lot. What this would be mostly? vegetables? meat? fish? Also: We can get vegatarian and vegan food. (sic) could you get more info about what kind of food it would be? Some years vegetarians have suffered a very repetitive menu... * Prices I have problems figuring out the costs of the conference. You mention the following items: * Double rooms are 100USD per night. A possible sponsoring by the government might reduce costs to 60-70USD. * Breakfast is included with the room price. Lunch+dinner are around 20USD per person per day. * An average conference room costs 200USD per day. So if I understood correctly, assuming we don't get the discount, we would pay 100/2 + 20 = 70 USD/person day full pension. That's more expensive that DC13! and we still would need to pay the conference rooms. Do all the conference rooms cost the same despite the difference on
[Debconf-team] [DC14] Portland team: questions after reading the bid
Hi, I haven't read the first answers to other questions (I didn't want to get influenced) so sorry in advance for the overlap. * Airport / Transport Portland International Airport doesn't have too many international connections so some attendees might land in the USA via Seattle Airport or even Vancouver (Canada), and then continue by land (because personal preference or price difference). What are the transport possibilities from these cities to Portland? How difficult and expensive is to go from the airport to PSU? * Visas I'm assuming we would send invitation letters to known people who want to attend DebConf as we do every year. Can we count with the help of somebody specialized in visas and/or from the Government to help us in some of the difficult cases? * Prices You mention the following items: * (breakfast, lunch, dinner) at the conference is $20/person/day * Our target package is USD 7200/week (conference facilities) * dorm USD 28/person/night up to 250 person and then 270 people in The Broadway at a higher rate of USD 33/person/night. So 48USD/person/day up to 250 person and then 52USD/person/day for the remaining full board places. I understand that the conference facilities can scale with the size of the conference and be rented only for hours, which is a plus. But I'm curious about how much extra cost in security there might be to have the hacklabs open 24h. * Accommodation You mention a place named University Place Hotel 800m away from the conference facilities. what we can expect there? Is this a dorm? The Hotel part has me wondering. Later, you mention The Ondine 250m away from the facilities and The Broadway, how far is that? What room capacity can we expect in these dorms? You mention hotels at an easy walking distance. How much is that? 200m? 500m? 1km? :) * Food I would appreciate more details about the food. When you say cafeteria in the residence hall, is this place the same that was mentioned under dorms (University Place Hotel)? * Children Does the hotel/university or some other place in the city provide childcare services? (At a fee, of course) * Backup plan Imagine a bad scenario, where we don't decide until mid-April and the University is not available any more. What is your backup plan? Or what are the possibilities that you would look at? * Dates Would the prices change substantially if we did the conference on dates not in mid-late August? ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf Committee meeting (for DC14): Friday March 22, 17:00UTC
Hi, On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 09:43:33AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: - We should try to keep the meeting at a maximum of 1 hour. As it has happened in the past, if we feel we cannot reach a decision, we should suspend and call for another meeting in 1-2 weeks time, after some more on-list discussion. I just sent my questions after reading carefully through the bid pages and I'm not sure if the bid teams will have time to answer them all before Friday. I also know some other members of the committee didn't have time to read the bids yet, so asking them to take a decision this Friday in less than 1 hour might be rushing things. But most importantly, the teams could realize that some stuff from their bids could be improved greatly after this first meeting and we should give them an opportunity to do so before a second meeting in 1 or maximum 2 weeks. So what about publishing already the doodle to put a date for the second meeting? Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DC14 bids: bid teams
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 09:42:40AM -0430, Luis Alejandro Martínez Faneyth wrote: Hi Moray, El 01/03/13 18:09, Moray Allan escribió: Both bid teams give a long list of team members on their wiki pages. Do the main team members live in the proposed city? If not, how far away are they? Are there other bid team members who live closer and would deal with local arrangements? 4 of the team members live in Puerto La Cruz. 3 live around 1 hour (bus), the rest may take 5 to 7 hours to arrive to the city. I read at: https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/debian-ve/2013-03/msg00041.html written by you that this number is an estimate. Could you please find out the real number? ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [DC14] Portland team: DebConf in the USA
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 09:28:52AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: We will find unacceptable lines with each of the proposals. But it is not the right time to get too much into the details on how and what offers to make - Lets first decide on the bids. Stating the visa problem is enough for now. We should later come to decisions on how to implement a workaround for said problems, if needed. Nothing to do with the entry in USA (already gave my opinion in this thread), just point is exactly this kind of attitude what lead us to the problems we have seen this year. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [DC14] Portland team: DebConf in the USA
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 05:16:22PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: [... a lot of stuff removed...] Could you please re-read my email? I said it had nothing to do with the on-going discussion w.r.t USA. I think Daniel got very sensible answers and he should realize now it is time to stop. Now for the kind of attitude, I'd appreciate if you could be clearer: are you saying that Gunnar's not the right time to get too much into details at the bids discussion time will lead to problems similar to this year's ? Your question is hard to understand, let me rephrase my point: Ignoring some stuff because you think they will be solved or workarounded later is not a good idea at the choosing bid stage as we have seen this year. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [DC14] Portland team: DebConf in the USA
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 05:50:41PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: Ignoring some stuff because you think they will be solved or workarounded later is not a good idea at the choosing bid stage as we have seen this year. I didn't understand from Gunnar's mail that he is ignoring the Portland-USA visa problem, at all. So I still don't get what point you are making [0]. OdyX [0] Actually, I suspect we are talking about the controversial DC13 venue choice, as initially and continuously proposed by the DC13 bid team. But I don't see how the USA visa policy is related. Yes, with this year I am clearly talking of dc13. My comment is meta to what Gunnar is saying: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 09:28:52AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: We will find unacceptable lines with each of the proposals. But it is not the right time to get too much into the details on how and what offers to make - Lets first decide on the bids. Stating the visa problem is enough for now. We should later come to decisions on how to implement a workaround for said problems, if needed. If one of the venues have a big negative point, we shouldn't ignore it, instead talk in advance and give the possibility to the people bidding to fix it. (when possible and reasonable) E.g. I find the hotels prices in Venezuela extremely high, I could ignore that point thinking we can find a workaround with cheaper hotels later and focus in the bid overall. Later, it can happen that the venezuelan team agrees in looking for other hotels (as has happened in previous years) or they can say they only will organize debconf in the selected hotels because they believed this was already chosen (as happened this year) PS: yes, I will be sending my questions about the bids later. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [DC14] Portland team: DebConf in the USA
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 11:20:32AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: Ana Guerrero dijo [Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 06:11:57PM +0100]: My comment is meta to what Gunnar is saying: On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 09:28:52AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: We will find unacceptable lines with each of the proposals. But it is not the right time to get too much into the details on how and what offers to make - Lets first decide on the bids. Stating the visa problem is enough for now. We should later come to decisions on how to implement a workaround for said problems, if needed. If one of the venues have a big negative point, we shouldn't ignore it, instead talk in advance and give the possibility to the people bidding to fix it. (when possible and reasonable) E.g. I find the hotels prices in Venezuela extremely high, I could ignore that point thinking we can find a workaround with cheaper hotels later and focus in the bid overall. Later, it can happen that the venezuelan team agrees in looking for other hotels (as has happened in previous years) or they can say they only will organize debconf in the selected hotels because they believed this was already chosen (as happened this year) Humm... I stand (no surprises!) with OdyX here. I *do* feel this is in no way the moment to nitpick on how visa issues should be handled, as we have historically shown that it's an issue that can be addressed effectively much later on. Visas are a difficult problem, wherever the conference happens to be, and we should not spend discussion time on visa issues at this stage. It's not ignoring the issue, but acknowledging we are aware of it, and will deal with it responsably. Please, read the full thread conversation with odyx before answering... This has nothing to do with the possible USA visa issues. I'm not beating the LeCamp horse again, as there wil always be opposing opinions. I disagree with your assessment. But lets leave it aside. If you all don't want to learn from the mistakes made in the past, we have a bigger problem. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf13 venue choice (was: [DC14] Portland team: DebConf in the USA)
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:45:22PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: I'm not sure it's the right place, time and thread to further debate that subject, though. No, it is not. But shouldn't we try to avoid future problems? That's what I'm trying here. As you might have noticed I stopped participating in dc13 mails long time ago and I'm planning to continue this way. I'm sorry if you sometimes see references to old stuff and think I'm trying to criticise this year. I already said all I had to say about this year, but we can not ignore the problems and discussions from the past if we want to avoid them again. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [DC14] Portland team: DebConf in the USA
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 06:27:30PM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote: My own feeling: countries like the US and Australia shouldn't bother holding major events like DebConf ... The visas and border problems are not limited to US and Australia and what we have to check every year is we have the resources to help the people in the best way possible. This also means sometimes sponsoring visas processes when they're expensive. Back in DC6, IIRC brazilians had a bad time to get their visas. Moray spent a quite amount of time helping people when DC7. I don't remember anything about DC8, but that doesn't mean nothing happened. In Dc9, I know government invitations were issued and sent by post mail. In DC10, there was an email alias with a lawyer specialized on this reading behind. Ask to our taiwanese contributors about DC11... etc ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] what do we think we can do better for dc13? example: random venue
On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 04:06:54PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: Le mercredi, 5 décembre 2012 15.37:32, Ana Guerrero a écrit : I guess this wasn't very clear in my first email, but I'm also considering the hostel as the venue for talks, hacklabs etc in the spirit of having everything in the same place. A similar arragament to the one we had in dc9. If you look at the website, they have multiple common rooms, some games room and the alike. look in the Infrastructure part in the right: http://www.youthhostel.ch/en/hostels/st-moritz With all the objectiveness I can use, I don't think the space they claim to have is anywhere near enough for our needs. if we are the only people staying in the hostel of the 80% of the people staying, likely we can arrange to have the rooms for our exclusive usage. That is speculative so far. Word back from the hostel director, we would have all the rooms except one ( 1 fireplace room to be used for other guests) for free. For what is worth, the standards we applied in looking for potential hacklabs in venues we investigated were: accessible 24/7, low security risk, enough space. I'm not yet convinced a hacklab in St-Moritz's youthhostel can fit either of these three concerns. You (local team) has said plenty of time Switzerland is very secure, so I don't know why this wouldn't apply to this hostel too ;) When you have the rooms for yourself you can have them accessible 24/7 and close them too (as we have done in previous years). As I told you by IRC, Didier, I know somebody who worked there in a previous winter season and I was told the staff was great. So far, I have not gotten any indication to indicate that a talkroom could happen in St-Moritz's youthhostel, nor for which price. Read above. As note, you didn't bother either to ask this in your mail. I have no intention to do any more research for St-Moritz (at least not now, while LeCamp is still being decided upon), so I have bounced both my initial mail and their answer to you, if you want to do more. Well, you told me this clearly by IRC: 16:11 OdyX I don't really care in fact. 16:11 OdyX We go to LeCamp, so I don't care. The internet is also for free and for the moment what they have is a 10Mbps line. I'm sorry for not sending this before, I had real life stuff. I still want to send it so I can point to it people in the future when they say le camp was our only possible venue. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] what do we think we can do better for dc13? example: random venue
On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 03:08:28PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: Hi Ana, hi all. Le samedi, 1 décembre 2012 17.38:05, Ana Guerrero a écrit : It has been said a few times that le camp have the same standars that a youth hostel, so I went to see how a swiss youth hostel looks like [1] and what possibilities they offered. I evaluated quickly one of them: http://www.youthhostel.ch/en/hostels/st-moritz So I went and asked them for an offer for 200 persons, for 7 persons in August. I pushed their offer to the DebConf-team private repository: dc13/venue-evaluation/St-Moritz/St-Moritz_20121205.pdf. Thanks for calling, it is *very* much appreciated. Their proposal (including a discount [0]) is the following: * 45 rooms for 4 persons each (180 persons) * 8 rooms for 2 persons each (16 persons) * 1 room for 4 persons with an included shower / WC (4 persons) The 45 + 8 = 53 rooms don't have a included shower, people have to use shared showers. That makes 4 persons with a privative shower. That isn't a problem at all as long as the hotel includes the typical shower arragement we had in other places, e.g. those showers-cabin we had in Columbia (dc10). For what I have seen in photos of this hostel, they have this kind of showers in segregated bathrooms. [...] Note that this price is without considering any venue for talks, hacklabs and stuff, without being allowed to use the WiFi access in the Youthhostel, etc. I guess this wasn't very clear in my first email, but I'm also considering the hostel as the venue for talks, hacklabs etc in the spirit of having everything in the same place. A similar arragament to the one we had in dc9. If you look at the website, they have multiple common rooms, some games room and the alike. look in the Infrastructure part in the right: http://www.youthhostel.ch/en/hostels/st-moritz if we are the only people staying in the hostel of the 80% of the people staying, likely we can arrange to have the rooms for our exclusive usage. The hostel also offers free wifi. I don't know if it will be up to our needs, but there is at least something included. For info: I can't access to the PDF ATM, no key here. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] privacy for women at le camp
Hi! On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 11:59:27AM +0100, Thomas Koch wrote: Hi, could somebody please point to a wiki page (write first) that explains the shower/toilets/bedrooms plan for women at le camp? Is it possible to have mixed houses and still have different bedrooms, showers and toilets for women? Or should we reserve one house for women? Which one? I'd propose to reserve the best house with the smallest rooms for women. Women should still not pay more for the smaller rooms IMHO. First, I think this goes in both ways, there also men who don't want to share shower/WC with women[1]. We have also people who don't want to share bathroom with anybody else, but le camp doesn't cater for them. The problem is not exactly sharing them, it is in some of the buildings the privacy in the provided bathroom seem to be inexistant, with a curtain and just the showering space where you do not have space for dressing. I don't think segregating by building is the solution since plenty of people want to be with partners or friend who are not of the same sex. The only solution here is putting people with privacy concerns (with respect showering) in the newer (and nicer) buildings that seem to have this kind of closed showers (I'm not sure about this, this is what the localteam claims). I'm not sure we have space for everybody with concerns in the nicer buildings and more importantly, we can not solve the problem we'll have if most of the people in a building want to shower in about the same time, like in the mornings before breakfast. [1] I'm very sorry for the very simplistic division of gender/sex here. But I'm sure in a place with more bathrooms we wouldn't have any problem like was the case in previous years. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Debconf thoughts
On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 09:22:16AM +0100, Martin Wuertele wrote: The discrimination part seems to me is a subjective opinion that is not shared by everyone. At least that is the impression I get from the discussions over the last weeks (please not that I've been following debconf-team for years). Discrimination is never subjective. They are rather unperceived, specially when they do not affect you. Some people have a family member depending on them and they can not attend DebConf if they don't bring along this family member (some times, it is the opposite case). They are not expecting Debian to pay for this family member, but we don't give them any facility to come to DebConf if we held debconf in le Camp. We also have contributors who are tall, and le Camp beds do not seem suited for tall people (more than 190cm), some people might camp, but some others prefer a bed. A lot of people can get by 1-2 days, but a full week can be a (back) pain. Some of those people might prefer going to a hotel. And probably many other reasons such a surgery recover, sleepwalking or snoring to the point you know that for other people sharing a room with you isn't healthy for them. In le Camp, the possibilities of affordable hotel are *far* away and you need a car, le Camp is served by public transportation but it is very limiting. (Somebody added in the wiki the distances by bike, but I don't know anyone who travels packing a bike in their suitcase...). These people will also lose a big part of the DebConf experience beause they will spend a big part of the conference far away or commuting. So we are effectively discriminating some people in coming. If you are not affected in any of those case or similars, good for you, some other people are. It will never be perfect but we should aim to make DebConf more inclusive, specially learning from the mistakes we have made in earlier years. The localteam did some research in venues a lot of months ago, we all made a mistake with that venue, we have found that is a mistake very early. So let's try solving it? ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Debconf thoughts
On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 12:22:24PM +0100, Martin Wuertele wrote: * Ana Guerrero a...@debian.org [2012-12-03 11:43]: On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 09:22:16AM +0100, Martin Wuertele wrote: I haven't heard that this is the case, what I read on the list is that there are buildings specifically for handicaped people on the one hand and I haven't read anything about a veto for family members. Could you please point me to the message concerning. Family members is different of teh case of handicaped people. Somebody bringing their partner along might want to sleep with their partner who might not feel comfortable in a room with 4 people more. Same with a kid (or 2 kids) that can be noisy. We also have contributors who are tall, and le Camp beds do not seem suited for tall people (more than 190cm), some people might camp, but some others prefer a bed. A lot of people can get by 1-2 days, but a full week can be a (back) pain. Some of those people might prefer going to a hotel. Can you backup your claim that beds are too small? This issue hasn't been raised so far iirc. Pictures. I havent' raised all the issues I have found. Just the most problematic ones. And probably many other reasons such a surgery recover, sleepwalking or snoring to the point you know that for other people sharing a room with you isn't healthy for them. So basically the same issues that applied to Oslo, Porto Alegre, Helsinki, Mexico, Edinburgh? Those people could go to a hotel. In Mexico, there was some kind of hotel in the same venue. In le Camp, the possibilities of affordable hotel are *far* away and you need a car, le Camp is served by public transportation but it is very limiting. (Somebody added in the wiki the distances by bike, but I don't know anyone who travels packing a bike in their suitcase...). [OT: so you haven't been to Banja Luca where several attendees had their folding bikes with them?] Nobody of them told me and I didn't see those bikes. These people will also lose a big part of the DebConf experience beause they will spend a big part of the conference far away or commuting. In Oslo and Helsinki there were quite some distances between venues, tough these were walking distances. However this is an issue that can propably be adressed, after all rental cars, car sharing,... are not completely new concepts. Not really. You lose the time, you can not stay until late hacking, you need to pay the rental car or depend on others. In Porto Alegre we rented busses for dinner as the venue was quite outside the center. And you transported *all* attendees together. So we are effectively discriminating some people in coming. If you are not affected in any of those case or similars, good for you, some other people are. I don't see any dicrimination, I see issues that need to be solved. Those issues can not be solved in le camp unless they remade all the buildings closer to the town. It will never be perfect but we should aim to make DebConf more inclusive, specially learning from the mistakes we have made in earlier years. The localteam did some research in venues a lot of months ago, we all made a mistake with that venue, we have found that is a mistake very early. So let's try solving it? It seems to me with your last sentance that because you don't agree with the venue, we all made a mistake. Please refrain from speaking for the project or debconf, last time I checked you were neither DPL nor delegate and from all the messages posted I still have the impression I am not the only one that does not agree with you. What I am saying is I'm also part of the problem and I made a mistake also a few months ago. You might say my mistake was maybe trusting too much what the localteam was saying back them. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Debconf thoughts
On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 11:12:47AM +, Philip Hands wrote: Have you not met Paul Sladen? ? As I said long ago, Le Camp (when considered as a DebConf venue) is family hostile, and for the same reasons is comfort-loving-corporate hostile, and also for those other cases you mention. This has been know and accepted since DC12, at least, if not before. No, a lot of information was unknown or not properly communicated. I was OK with the venue being somehow isolated because I was told accommodation had a better standard it had (looks my email about the youth hostel) and there was good public transportation (turns out is not the case). Wherever we decide to go will advantage some groups and penalise others, and perhaps it's time that the smelly tree-huggers had their turn ;-) Have we discriminated those tree-huggers before? I would say it is not the case. Personally, I'm rather glad that it looks like we'll only have to put up with this place for a week, rather than two, but now that the decision is made, we should stop whining about it and do everything in our power to make it the best DebConf ever and prove all the doubters wrong. Nobody was forcing you to attend to debcamp+debconf during 2 weeks anyway. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Debconf thoughts
On Mon, Dec 03, 2012 at 01:42:43PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: Especially given the overwhelming impact of the discrimination effects of _money_, which is an extremly great factor for any DebConf in Switzerland, I think Le Camp is a very good choice. We will be more equal there than in most *any* other place in that country. That's the reason why we addressed the money issue making debconf only one week. Look at my email in st-moritz, there are plenty of alternatives to look at. And this has been decided several times by our regular decision means, which are scheduled+logged irc meetings. And then there was a DPL appeal, which the DPL delegated to the chairs and the chairs then had a meeting in #debconf- team, where we decided to that breaking ties was not needed as we thought the teams decision to go with Le Camp was still sound, so we confirmed that the contract with Le Camp should still be signed now (pending some editorial changes, if they are possible). A meeting where you didn't move your position a single centimeter, where people was looking for concensus and the only way out was minimizing damages. A meeting where your welcome to me was a you're late and the most repeated argument for you was sigh. http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2012/debconf-team.2012-11-22-20.00.log.html [a lot of tangential stuff not relevant to the discussion removed] P.S.: And I'm taller than 1.90m and I slept fine in those beds there... :-) Good for you, as said, that isn't the case for everybody. There is also people under 1.90m who won't sleep fine there. And instead of claiming we cannot have families there, can those families please speak up, I'm sure we can find ways to accomodate very different needs there, including families and people who insist on one room mate only. And for those who cannot stand anyone in their room: sadly there are only 3 true single rooms. But so far all 3 of them are free and unclaimed :-) Registrations hasnt started yet. Why do we have to work making exceptions instead of making it fine for almost everybody? it is not that _difficult_. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] what do we think we can do better for dc13? example: ruhrgebiet
Hi Thomas, On Sat, Dec 01, 2012 at 06:18:28PM +0100, Thomas Koch wrote: Ana Guerrero: It has been said a few times that le camp have the same standars that a youth hostel, so I went to see how a swiss youth hostel looks like [1] and what possibilities they offered. I evaluated quickly one of them: http://www.youthhostel.ch/en/hostels/st-moritz Hi Ana, I also feel a bit worried about the current situation. I'm personally fine with le camp but I understand that many others have issues. I was looking for hotel prices in my home region[1] (Ruhr area, Germany) just for curiosity minutes before your email. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr.2010 Just by quickly searching the net I get quotes around 50 Euros/night in a 4- Star conference Hotel. I'm sure one can get much cheaper prices after a serious search and some negotiation for 200 people and a full week + 1 week debcamp and maybe only 3 or 2 stars. http://www.intergerma.de/tagungshotels/region-ruhrgebiet/ For food prizes Germany beats Switzerland any day. Thanks for proposing another alternatives. However I don't know how realistic it would be to switch countries at this point. Are there country sensitive sponsors by now? Yes, there are some sponsors confirmed or being contacted that would probably not sponsor if DebConf were held out of Switzerland. However, I don't expect that to affect to our two confirmed platinum sponsors that are the biggest part of our pledged money amount so far. On the other side, I think that something everybody seems to agree is in having DebConf in Switzerland. I'm told the local team is willing to continue working in organising DebConf even if we changed the venue, although some people would contribute less (something I understand). However, what I can not understand is the denial to look at other venues by the localteam. Or all the negative comments and insulting attitude towards somebody who decided to explore possibilities by *some* members from the localteam and the globalteam. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Debconf thoughts
On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 02:01:05PM +0100, Martin Wuertele wrote: Hi, since quite a lot of mails have been writte about evolution of Debconf let me add my share. I've attended the debconfs in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2011. For me the all-time best was Porto Alegre in 2004. And that solely because it was for me the best mixture between numbers of attendees and closeness of the locaten: we were all in the same hotel (where 4 people were squeezed in 2 bed rooms and iirc 6 in 3 bed rooms) and it all felt like a big family. I liked the accomodation in Helsinki a lot for the same reasons tough the distance to talk rooms and the hacklab were a bit far. For me the idea of getting most attendees togeather in a location like Le Camp sounds great. We can have this in other locations that are not le camp. I also like things this way. But a debconf that is discriminating people to go doesn't seem to be very familyish to me. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] what do we think we can do better for dc13? example: random venue
Hi, I have shared this for IRC, but I'm told if it is not in the list it doesn't count. And also not everybody has the time to follow by IRC. It has been said a few times that le camp have the same standars that a youth hostel, so I went to see how a swiss youth hostel looks like [1] and what possibilities they offered. I evaluated quickly one of them: http://www.youthhostel.ch/en/hostels/st-moritz If you look at the info provided in that page, the site looks nice, also look for Google images of saint moritz. There is a lake, a forest and also mountains. It is close to the nature with spectacular views. For me, it has the image of what is sold from Switzerland. The hostel provides 306 beds in rooms of 2 and 4 beds where people do not need to carry sleeping bags or similar to sleep. Some of the room provide WC/shower inside (that also are the expensiver ones). Rooms are big and they offer fourniture such as tables and chairs. (see photos) The place is also fully qualified for handicapped people, more info at: http://www.youthhostel.ch/en/hostels/st-moritz/handicap It provides plenty of common rooms we can use: 5 'day rooms', 2 games rooms and a big hall. The only issue with the rooms is we lack of a big auditorium, the biggest room is similar to the one we had in debconf8, this is balanced by the fact we can have plenty of small hacklabs that provide working in group easier and also impromptu BOFs. If you look at the sourrounding in Google Maps, you can see several hotels reachable by foot. The youth hostel is not in the middle of the town, but in the exterior part (close to the forest): https://maps.google.com/maps?f=qsource=s_qhl=engeocode=q=Youth+Hostel+St.+Moritz+Bad,+Via+Surpunt,+Saint+Moritz,+Switzerlandaq=0oq=youth+hostel+saint+moritzsll=37.6,-95.665sspn=47.028011,93.076172vpsrc=6t=hie=UTF8hq=Youth+Hostel+St.+Moritz+Bad,+Via+Surpunt,+Saint+Moritz,+Switzerlandhnear=radius=15000ll=46.489972,9.841604spn=0.02021,0.045447z=15 With a supermarket (and other shops) 1.3km away http://maps.google.com/maps?f=dsource=s_dsaddr=Youth+Hostel+St.+Moritz+Bad,+Via+Surpunt+60,+7500+St.+Moritz,+Switzerlanddaddr=Via+dal+Bagn+20,+St.+Moritz,+Switzerlandhl=engeocode=FYhexQIdmz2WACEYoBTkfCpekinRe7YjxX2DRzEYoBTkfCpekg%3BFbJlxQId0BKWAClncT1P6H2DRzG13Ra-9z_juwaq=1oq=Via+Surpunt+60,+7500+St.+Moritz,sll=46.48846,9.84036sspn=0.009366,0.022724vpsrc=0dirflg=wmra=ltmie=UTF8t=mz=16 The place is a very popular destination for winter sports but it is less popular in summer and therefore cheaper. With the group discount, we would get similar prices to le camp. Saint Moritz is easily reachable by train from Zurich (one change of train) and I'm told some parts of the trip are quite impressive. There is also an airport with regular flights to some cities for those who can afford going directly to the place. Other stuff that is very nice to have and we woudn't have in le camp: - They offer a laundry room - you can rent a bike directly in the hostel. - Day trip could be done hiking around - people with kids have a special play area in the hostel - people who want to leave later or arrive early, can just reserve rooms separately and do it You can read some reviews of the place at http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/Youthhostel-St-Moritz/St-Moritz/11139/reviews From people all over the world (this is people with very different expectatives) More photos and reviews at http://www.booking.com/hotel/ch/jugendherberge-st-moritz.en.html?aid=311088 Another similar place I didn't took the time to research but looking similar is: http://www.youthhostel.ch/en/hostels/davos Ana [1] Full list at http://youthhostel.ch/en ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] what do we think we can do better for dc13? example: random venue
On Sat, Dec 01, 2012 at 05:38:05PM +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: There is also an airport with regular flights to some cities for those who can afford going directly to the place. The airport doesn't have regular flights, but indeed, if you can afford it, you can flight there directly :) ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [Debconf-discuss] Information about accommodation at le camp (photos and plans) ·
On Sat, Dec 01, 2012 at 12:22:26AM +, Moray Allan wrote: On 2012-11-30 22:25, Moray Allan wrote: Personally I find this a strong negative I have been asked on IRC to clarify my position/thinking: Personally I think Le Camp is a bad choice of venue. I am influenced in that by how unattractive it is to me personally in the context of a technical conference to stay in an indoor camping setup, and the lack of any alternative accommodation for a non-driver who wants to be around late in the evenings. However, I already thought this at the time of the venue decision meeting for DebConf13, and yet Le Camp won when votes were cast by the DebConf Committee after a lack of consensus from the preceding discussion. Because I had pushed the creation of the venue decision process including that vote, even if I have also felt it appropriate to voice my own concerns again as part of discussion when the topics have come up, I feel a duty to respect the decision of that meeting. It is a pity you (or others) didn't raise your concerns strongly back then. It is valid from my perspective for the DebConf team to choose a venue that does not please everyone, just as for DebConf10 a venue was chosen in the US which some people didn't like for political reasons; or just as the lower attendance last year was probably due to the high costs of reaching Nicaragua. I disagree, every case is different. People when DebConf10 chose not go to there because their political ideas, others share the same political ideas but thought the people in USA didn't have anything to do with their politicians. Nicaragua is also different, the two option we had for dc12 were expensive (as in far for most developers), so there wasn't a lot to do there. There will never a location close to everybody unless somebody invents teletransportation soon. This year, we're still in time to find a place that is suitable for more people. We can not achieve 100% but at least give people choice, even if some people might anyway not like mountains or swiss chocolate... (Although there are not mountains close to le camp, nor a supermarket to buy chocolate). In the last few months I raised additional concerns about money, when the full costs of Le Camp became apparent (or rather, when the costs didn't reduce with negotiation as it been suggested that they would, and when fundraising started later than planned). However, the financial risk is mitigated if we will now only commit to an 8-day rather than 15-day DebConf period. The costs are still extremely high, but as the locals have pointed out, that would mostly be true anywhere Switzerland. Costs won't change a lot from changing venues, no. But we can get something much better for a similar price. Pocock easily found other possible venues and I have found another interesting option I haven't shared on list, only in IRC. It is possible that some of those who originally voted for Switzerland didn't see issues exactly as they have emerged, or expected, as in most years recently, that issues about the venue would be sorted out by later changes, rather than expecting that the locals would insist that we stick with the precise venue choice. But that's something that I feel should be commented on by anyone who was initially for Switzerland/Le Camp, and now against it, not speculated about by me for whom the issues appear much the same as at the time of the bid decision meeting. That's exactly what I did in a previous email that you have probably read. For reference: http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20121122.153221.79d33304.en.html I wasn't fully happy with none of the venues but I seriously trusted the swiss team into improving their bid or switching it. Switching venues is something we have done often and no localteam was hurt in the process. When I realized about how bad things were going 2 months ago (funnily from holger's emails), I was told repetitively I was late and that's what it seems the team decided. We were 11 months before DebConf and now we are 9, why we can be so optimist about finding money that depends in so many external factors and so negative about finding a better venue, something that depends a lot more on us? ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Regarding DebConf13 planned location
Answering this email because I have been named. On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 12:39:51PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: My general comment is, that I have not seen any new arguments in the last seven days or so. (I also spoke with Ana on Sunday for more than an hour, and while I learned several personal things, I didnt see any new global points.) What I learned in Sunday is you wanted talking just to say you have talked and there was nothing new. You didn't want to discuss the issues, you started the discussion trying to find out what is my bigger problem with the intention of trying to calm down that. I'm very dissapointed how despite how much you're pushing for le camp and saying everything is fine you ignore quite a lot important details about the negotiation (such as the minimum forfait we pay). Important things I have learn in the last day: - We have very few WC and showers per building, something in the order of one shower or WC for every 8-10 people. Since we don't have cleaning (le camp is not a hotel), we need to do that cleaning ourselves or hire somebody to do it. Cleaning toilets and shower is NOT optional, we're likely to hire somebody and that should go in the budget. - The showers are unisex and in some buildings they are not the typical shower cabin where you shower and dress. They are just the shower with a curtain and the dressing part is outside, in the commun area. [...] And finally, the risk for this is with the dc13.ch association, _not_ with Debian. There is no Debian money at risk. the dc13.ch association is also Debian and it is formed for Debian contributors we shouldn't leave in their own if there is any problem. [...] If we'd go to Interlaken, there would be less private hacking spaces. And as for personal privacy (as opposed to hacking privacy), Interlaken would only provide this for the rich, who can afford there own hotel room. For sponsored attendees Interlaken offers _less_ privacy. (Did you look at Balmers tent village? Balmers itself? I did...) Interlaken is really like Cowgate hostels were, or maybe worse. (And please keep in mind that the other cheap option the localteam managed to find where bunkers (as in nuclear shelters).) Facts: - Interlaken prices are similar to le camp: 21 CHF in le camp vs 25 CHF in interlaken with breakfast (and rooms+bathroom cleaning and free transportation ticket for the day) - In both cases, people wanting something better have to pay. While in le camp there aren't options nearby, in Interlaken you have several options in less than 5m. Furthermore, all the quotes room in interlaken are for less than 10 people and you can get private suites with bathroom for a competive price in the very same hostel. (just check in www.balmers.com) - Interlaken hasn't been said to be *better* accommodation, just an accommodation without some of the issues we have in le camp. We don't need to go to Interlaken, what we need is people realizing we should look at other venues. Interlaken is a good example that there is good possibilities out there and thincking le camp is our only way is rushed. 3.) Complaints on the list vs approval / applaus elsewhere I cannot ignore the fact, that the recent complaints on the list where from people who can afford hotels, fearing of missing their luxury. (And such privacy as demanded is luxury IMO. Understandable luxury, but still.) How can you be sure about this? OTOH I have heard quite a lot of people (in person) approving or applauding our plans to hold DebConf in the Le Camp setting. (Including people with children, btw.) I don't understand the reference to children here unless you tell those people are planning to get their children to le camp. I also have heard quite a lot of people (in person) disgusted with le camp. One final comment: plenty of people haven't spoken about their impression of le camp because after they read the first complains being handwaved or ignored, they thought there was not point.. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Signing the contract with LeCamp
On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 08:55:45PM +0100, Philipp Hug wrote: If someone disagrees with this course of action, they should say it now. I do. I feel the meeting was forced and the concensus was not a real concensus. Some people were in the position: it is le camp or nothing and some people (myself included), just tried to do 'damage control' and asked to only sign for a week if it really needed to be 'le camp' or nothing. After 90m of meeting going in circles, people get real tired. [1] I'm myself surprised that some of the people pushing for le camp prefer skiping debcamp instead of researching more suitables alternative venues where we could get the needed flexibility to try having it all. I am myself in favour of skiping DebCamp if we need to cut somewhere, but just skipping it without trying is sad. I found some good information about the accommodation, I'm sending a separate email. [1] The log of this meeting is at: http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2012/debconf-team.2012-11-22-20.00.log.html ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] Information about accommodation at le camp (photos and plans)·
Hi everybody, I found a site with photos that together with the plans of le camp available at their website, allow to get a much better idea of what is being offered in terms of accommodation at Le camp. Le camp is the proposed venue for holding DebConf 13. The venue contains several building, let's see one of them. You can get a full plan of le camp at: http://www.lecamp.ch/visite.php?lang=# Once there, select the building No 5. you will a pop up window with some photos of it and a PDF with the plan. This building contains 2 floors with the following: floor 0 (Rez-de-chaussée, entry floor to the building) * 1 dorm with 14 sleeping places * 1 dorm with 12 sleeping places * 1 veranda with capacity for 20 people floor -1 (sous-sol, floor under the entry floor) * 1 bedroom with 2 sleeping places provided by a bunk bed * 1 kitchen * a bathroom providing 3 showers and 2 WC. If you go to http://www.groups.ch/fr/K-0806-5487/colonies_vacances_photos.html You can get some photos of the rooms: - Photos: 1-3 overall view of the venue. - Photo 4: shows the kitchen - Photo 5: shows the veranda, it doesn't detail how many pieces of furniture there are available further than the chairs. - Photo 6: shows the 2 dorms with 14 and 12 sleeping places. If you enlarge the photo, some details are revealed: - the dorms do not have doors, so you could consider we have a bigger dorm of 26 places - sleeping places are not separated - it is not clear what you need to sleep there, is this 'nordique' or 'sleeping bag' style? - I have not idea how people sleeping in the higher beds are supposed to get into them, help? - There is not place for personal belongings, are they supposed to be left in the veranda? - Photo 7: it is the bedroom for 2 people with the bunk bed. - Photo 8: This is the only bathroom provided in the building. It is expected to serve to the up to 28 people sleeping in the building with 3 showers. It is also unisex with the privacy conditions you can appreciate in the shower. - Photo 9-10 and again beautiful photos of the external part of the venue. To my understanding, the accommodation on the remaining buildings is in a similar state. With some different arrangement for the beds disposed for people in wheelchair. I don't know about the showers for people in wheelchair but it would be also good to know. I don't know the status for other kinds of disabilities. If to all the above if you add details like the nearest supermarket being 3.7km away or that the nearest hotel is mostly unaffordable (320CHF the night for a double room) and the rest of the hotels listed are between 3km and 7km away, so if you don't want to stay at le camp your possibilities of being somewhere else are quite limited and you need a car we have end having a venue that IMHO is unsuitable for DebConf. I wrote an email mentioning some problems a week ago, but some stuff there is hard to understand if you haven't following debconf-team@ and #debconf-team, sadly lists.debconf.org doesn't have the archive available in this moment :( Marga and vorlon have done another analysis about the accommodation, once http://lists.debconf.org is back, you should be able to read their emails there if you haven't. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Information about accommodation at le camp (photos and plans)·
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 01:30:31PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote: Hi Ana, many thanks for your nice research. On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 12:22:13PM +0100, Ana Guerrero wrote: ... http://www.lecamp.ch/visite.php?lang=# ... To my understanding, the accommodation on the remaining buildings is in a similar state. With some different arrangement for the beds disposed for people in wheelchair. I don't know about the showers for people in wheelchair but it would be also good to know. I don't know the status for other kinds of disabilities. From http://www.lecamp.ch/communs/batiments.php?id=8lang=en I would guess that they care about disabilities. People who have visited Le Camp might like to comment on this. Indeed. It would be good to have the information so the people with disabilities can raise possible concerns. If to all the above if you add details like the nearest supermarket being 3.7km away or that the nearest hotel is mostly unaffordable (320CHF the night for a double room) and the rest of the hotels listed are between 3km and 7km away, so if you don't want to stay at le camp your possibilities of being somewhere else are quite limited and you need a car Right, it is most probably a good thing to have a car if you need to relay on services not available in Le Camp. On the other hand given the location I expect at least having 10 cars of DebConf attendees probably more. I have also read Marga's concern about the lack of an available supermarket. People who have visited Le Camp might like to comment whether there is some way to buy some basic needs forgotten toiletries / extra+different food (again - I think I remember that it was posted here but the archive ... ) Given the quite safe assumption that there are cars around it is a question of organising things and even if I do not say we are excellent in organising we even managed to rent two busses from Banja Luka. I can not seriosely imagine that we should be unable to get all basic needs served. I expect those having cars possibily not wanting to spend all the day driving others to the town to buy whatever. People might have needs very important to them that drivers might feel irrelevant. We also can't force people with cars to drivers other. Some people might want just have the car parked the whole week. we have end having a venue that IMHO is unsuitable for DebConf. I admit after having seen the URL you were hinting above I thought: What a great place for a DebConf! So, sorry, same facts totally different conclusion. If you see debconf as some holidays, certainly. For debconf you need talk rooms, hacklabs, internet, etc that are impossible to evaluate seeing those photos. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [Debconf-discuss] Information about accommodation at le camp (photos and plans) ·
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 01:14:54PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: Hi Ana, Thanks for this (more) informed mail. Unfortunately, it has some imprecisions that (unwillingly, I'm sure), spread FUD. If you provide more information instead of handwaving concerns, I'm sure you can contrarrest what you call here a FUD. Le lundi, 26 novembre 2012 12.22:13, Ana Guerrero a écrit : The venue contains several building, let's see one of them. You chose building 5. As you mention further down, this building has 25 sleeping places. a No, 28. The camp itself recommends it for a group of between 10-20 people. Sadly, it is only in French: http://www.groups.ch/fr/K-0806-5487/colonies_vacances_descriptif.html I invite people to go to the link you provided and investigate the other buildings. Bulding 5 is, together with Building 4, the buildings with the most rustic accomodation. No problem. I can send another analysis of another building. Which is the one you consider better? Do you want to do it yourself so you can add your own experience after visiting the site? You can get a full plan of le camp at: http://www.lecamp.ch/visite.php?lang=# If you enlarge the photo, some details are revealed: - the dorms do not have doors, so you could consider we have a bigger dorm of 26 places That's plain wrong, and can be seen from the PDF plan: a picture with two doors open doesn't mean rooms have no doors. I believe you in it having doors, but i have been unable to appreciate it in the photos. I was mostly concerned about the rooms being so closed with this disposition that any noise or disturb in one of the rooms will affect the other. E.g. people going to sleep later than others in one rooms will be noticed in the another. - sleeping places are not separated yes do you propose any solution to this? - I have not idea how people sleeping in the higher beds are supposed to get into them, help? You can see from http://www.groups.ch/images/haeuser/zusatz/K-0806-5487-6_20091202024753.jpg?mt=1259761673 that the vertical wooden beams act as ladders. IMHO non-disabled people of reasonable physical condition can enter the upper beds without problems. Do you think it is possible doing it without touching the people who is sleeping next to you? - There is not place for personal belongings, are they supposed to be left in the veranda? Good point, to be investigated. I guess usual guests in these houses use their bags for this purpose. Yes, but where do they store it? With some different arrangement for the beds disposed for people in wheelchair. I don't know about the showers for people in wheelchair but it would be also good to know. I don't know the status for other kinds of disabilities. As you can see from http://www.lecamp.ch/offresHotes.php?lang= some of their hosts propose week-long camps for mentally disabled people (just to say that people are having events there with more disabled people than we usually have). All the main (non-hosting) buildings provide wheelchair-accessible facilities. Passerelle has 15 wheelchair accessible beds, including showers and toilets. As for other type of disabilities, we don't have information as far as I know, but we could ask. As told to Andreas in this thread, it would be good if you put all more information about all this available so people with disabilities can judge for themselves. If to all the above if you add details like the nearest supermarket being 3.7km away or that the nearest hotel is mostly unaffordable (320CHF the night for a double room) That's a silly example as that's a castle, with a single double room. As for other hotels, the list we begun to build is there: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/AlternativeAccomodation It was pointed out recently that this lists lacks the hotels of Yverdon-les- Bains and Neuchâtel that are ~ 40 minutes of bus away from LeCamp. That's 1h20 of commute every day, it is not al real option. You removed my part about the bathroom, do you have possible solutions to the small amount of showers for such a number of people and the sharing between sexes problem? this is the same in all the building I have checked. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Information about accommodation at le camp (photos and plans)·
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 02:14:39PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote: If you see debconf as some holidays, certainly. For debconf you need talk rooms, hacklabs, internet, etc that are impossible to evaluate seeing those photos. With the exception of internet which was not visible on the plan (but confirmed by Le Camp to be extended to our needs) I have definitely seen talk rooms and hacklabs - and they locked really nice and perfectly fit. That's actually the very good news I obtained from the link you gave. Good. Feel like sharing the links and comments so others attendees can see them? Thanks in advance. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [Debconf-discuss] Information about accommodation at le camp (photos and plans) ·
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 07:44:22PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: Hi Jonathan, tl;dr: not all LeCamp beds are like those shown by Ana. [...] I understand (and can share part of) your concerns. Yet, as mentionned (on - team probably, sorry for that), Buildings 4 and 5 provide the most rustic accomodation. Other buildings such as Passerelle [0] provide a ladder to access the upper beds and lockers for your stuff. The rooms in the Passarelle are indeed much nicer, it seems the best building where somebody might end up. However your claims are misleading, this building offers smaller rooms (that I guess will be assigned to people paying) and it is also one of the building where the people with reduced mobility can go. For this people, the superior bunk bed is removed, thus reducing the capacity of the building further. Let's see the details of this building. Get the PDF from: http://www.lecamp.ch/communs/batiments.php?id=6lang= The pdf is one page with the map. This building contains: - 2 rooms with a bunk bed: 2 sleeping places or 1 if the person is with reduced mobility. - 1 room with a bunk bed: 2 places (or 1 reduced), with a lavabo - 3 room with 2 bunk bed: 4 places (or 2 reduced). - 2 rooms with 4 bunk bed: 8 places (or 4 reduced) - 1 meeting room with 20 seats. - 1 bathroom with 2 shower+WC for handicapped people - 1 bathroom with 2 WC and 3 showers (not sure about this looking at the plan). This is a unisex bathroom+shower... Pictures are at: http://www.groups.ch/fr/K-0806-5489/colonies_vacances_photos.html - pictures 3 and 4: show the 8 (or 4) person room. In the case we don't get anybody with reduced mobility, we would have 32 sleeping places there. Obviously some people will end here, but not everybody will. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf13 decision meeting: past and present
Hi,
All the you in this email are plural you.
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 07:20:09PM +0100, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
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.
Can you be more precise there ? As I (biasedly) see it, it has got better,
not
worse in the last months.
The points I presented below in my first mail were the things that have gotten
worse. Could you tell me what has gotten better?
* accommodation and camping.
(…)
What is the situation now:
We can't camp.
That's wrong.
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.
This has been written already several times, but let's repeat it here: We've
been told, in several face-to-face meetings with the responsible of LeCamp,
that we would be allowed to camp. As we are having a trustful relation with
him, even if it's not (yet ?) written down, we are confident (I am 100%
confident; not 99%, 100%) that we'll be allowed to camp during DebConf.
If it isn't in the contract, we can not know for certain we'll be able to
camp. The responsible of Le Camp has a board behind of him who can overrule
him or he can decide for whatever reason he is finally not happy with it.
This is very clear in the conditions générales.
That putting things in a biased perspective. Many rooms have less than 6 beds
per room, in modern buildings.
I added in my original email the list of rooms and sizes, people can make
easily their own perspectives.
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.
Yes. But people not in hotels would sleep in anti-nuclear underground
bunkers. I (for one) am not interested in organising a conference where the
richers can get hotel beds and the rest is supposed to go sleep under the
ground (literally).
I think LeCamp provides globally (on average/median) better hosting
conditions
for cheaper than what we could get in Geneva.
You also can compare with Interlaken. My point here was the looking for
alternative accommodation near le camp is very expensive even for swiss
standards. While in another venue be Geneva, be Interlaken, while still not
affordable for everybody, it would be affordable for a larger number of
people.
Your sentence about the richers only being able to afford the best
accommodation is already applied in 'le camp' were you plan to have a fee
for people wanting to have a better bed/room and maybe also give this room
in priority to professionals.
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.
Le Camp is also isolated and at a forest: you can be literally alone in
the
woods (and safe) within 5 minutes walk. That was not possible in
DebConf1{1,2} as far as I'm concerned.
And people won't be surrounded by people 24/7, that's again a biased way to
put it.
If the only way you have to be 5min alone is going alone in the forest, I have
not words...
* possibility of external catering
(…)
198.46153846153845
we wouldn't reach the threshold.
I disagree. And on top of that, I'm really (really) tired of this dance: the
biggest initial concern against LeCamp was that it was too small (!). This
has
been hashed on our heads for months: we should be looking for something else
because it will certainly be filled, by far. I don't think it's fair to use
the exact inverse argument now, sorry.
Could you point to any email or where in the decision meeting was concerned
about le camp size? I don't remember any of that.
We spent _lots_ of time and energy investigating possible venues _before_
choosing that one (this was last year, in autumn). We kept a very clear track
record of that on the wiki. Back then (before and after the decision) we have
not been listened, for understandable reasons already explained before. We
(alone) then picked the solution we thought would be best and that would fit
our vision most closely. We presented both our vision and our choice
(including the alternatives) to the decision meeting. Then we got the
critics,
mostly about the vision and venue we had proposed (while accepted by the
decision meeting).
This all felt (and feels) like not trusting us as a group, for the work we
did
before and after the decision meeting and for the experience we
[Debconf-team] DebConf13 decision meeting: past and present
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
Re: [Debconf-team] DebConf13 decision meeting: past and present
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 08:22:53PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: yeah, right totally true. And as I see it, this is so far the best prepared DebConf _ever_: we already have 60K, with 10-40k in the pipeline, and we are _NINE_ months ahead. Sadly, sponsorship is not lineal. So far, most of the companies who have agreed to sponsor DebConf were the already convinced ones and some have even already budgeted for us. Raising a lot of money isn't going to fix some of the concerns I have raised. The discussions on this list for a large part have drifted away quite a lot IMO. As I see it (and compared to any other year), we are doing great. (On technical terms, preparing dc13. There are other aspects where we are somewhat lacking.) People have stopped mailing and talking about concerns because they have been ignored, called bad person because 'they don't trust the localteam', and in some cases by IRC, insulted or seen how others were insulted by giving an opinion that doesn't agree with yours. You take the silence as you are doing great, I take it as some people just stop caring about next year's DebConf, realized they are not going and just moved on. I personally wrote a big part of my first email some days ago, I wasn't planning to send it but I got some encouragement to do it. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Travel sponsorship proposal
On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 12:08:02PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: At the risk of repeating myself: we should not provide late travel sponsorship, *at all*. It's an inefficient use of funds. If we can't provide travel sponsorship in a timely manner, *don't* provide travel sponsorship - save the money for next year when it will do more good. Do you think providing travel sponsorship 4 months ahead is not timely? If that's the case, we'll have to agree to disagree. Granting travel sponsorship to some people before we know if we can grant them with food and accommodation would be strange. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] professional and corporate numbers from previous years
On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 03:38:09PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: Hi Ana, thanks for the interesting statistics! On Dienstag, 6. November 2012, Ana Guerrero wrote: ... Given le camp is in a place isolated, I fear some people not finding alternatives easily might give up in attending this year. actually it's not that isolated, it's 15-20min by car to either Neuchatel or Lausanne. That's a lot less than what most people commute daily for work - and I'm pretty sure there wont be traffic jams :) Granted this requires a car, but there are more then enough of those in Europe. (And sadly, car sharing will be the cheapest option for most Europeans to attend.) Let's not enter in what is far or not, we wouldn't anywhere. It is a cultural conception, for some 10m walking is a very close place and for some 10m walking is far. While some live happily without a car, some don't know how to live without a car That the place is easily reachable if you are lucky enough to have or afford a car doesn't mean the place is not isolated. I'd like to twist this argument: (as I think it's important to focus on how to make this work, rather then to think about how things might not work...) Sorry, you aren't twisting any arguments. I give my thoughts with a reason, you aren't giving any reasoning. People can be happy staying with the crowd and people can hate cars and they won't like staying at le camp to the point of simply not attending. - understand that they contribute to DebConf this way. This might need additional help (ie announcements). So far we never really tried to sell prof/corp attendence type very much. Isn't this what we did in DC10? I remember sending emails to people about it, a few of them. - happily choose to become paying attendees as we closed sponsored attendence after reaching X applications (because we might choose this as our way to deal with not enough incoming sponsorship money) This would be terribly sad and unfair. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] professional and corporate numbers from previous years
Hi everybody, I have compiled some numbers about the professionals and corporate attendees from previous years. Disclaimer: those stats only counts people attending to DebConf who registered in penta. The numbers are not 100% accurate since every year we end having some last minutes changes that are not registered in penta or we can't register in penta but can be checked in their payment lists and in the room accommodation. I didn't feel it was worth my time crossing data to get the exact figures because I think they are good enough to get a rough idea. * DebConf 8* DebConf 8 was in Argentina in a nice hotel, so attendees didn't have any reason to look to another hotel to stay. Professional paid 300 EUR per week and Corporate 1000 EUR. We had 252 people reconfirming attendance, 124 sponsored, 55 who didn't stay in the hotel (most seem attendees to Debian Day), 5 corporate and 45 professional. And we have 23 people who status is unknown, but they seem to be a mix of people who attended debian day, people who only come a few days and stayed somewhere else. But for sure, they are not professionals. A list of corporate/professionals was published but some people might have opted out: http://debconf8.debconf.org/corporate.xhtml.en * DebConf 9* DebConf 9 was in Cáceres in a student's housing with only 2 beds per room. Cáceres has nice hotels with good prices, so some people preferred staying in hotels nearby. Professional paid 300 EUR per week and Corporate 1000 EUR. We had 268 people reconfirming attendance, 168 sponsored, 69 who didn't stay at the student's residence (they aren't debian day attendees we didn't ask people to register in penta to attend Debian day and I can recognize some speakers who came for only one day in the list), 2 corporate and 23 professionals. * Debconf 10* DebConf 10 was in NYC in a student's housing. The prices were very high and even after reconfirming people sponsorship, we send everybody a email asking to pay for their food or accommodation. As result, some people with sponsorship switched to professional and some decided to pay part of their expenses (food or accommodation). The data for this year in penta show a *high number of inconsistencies* when crossing them with the payments and accommodation spreadsheet. Specially those 196 people who are listed as going somewhere else. A lot of them stated in Columbia and some even as professional. We had 415 people reconfirming attendance: - 120 with sponsored food+accommodation, - 9 people with only sponsored accommodation - 13 people with only sponsored food (some here might have chosen staying somewhere else) - 196 people who might have stayed somewhere else and paid for their food or only registered for attending the Debian day. - 36 professionals (who paid 650 USD) - 4 corporate (who paid 1300 USD) - we have about 30 people without data, I checked in the accommodation, and 12 of those were sponsored while the 18 remaining where people we denied sponsorship. * Debconf 11* Debconf 11 was held in a hotel as in DebConf11, there was not point of professional people going somewhere else since we were staying in the best hotels in the city. Professional was 450 EUR and corporate was 1000 EUR. We had 450 people reconfirming attendance: - 213 fully sponsored - 186 who didn't stay in the hotel (95 % of the people are listed are Bosnians and some Croatians, most likely locals and people attending debian day) - 35 professionals - 2 corporate - 14 people are shown as unknown, 1 of them was sponsored, 1 of them was somebody who didn't pay and the 12 remaining seem to be locals * DebConf 12* DebConf12 was held in a nice hotel, again no reason to go somewhere else. Professional paid 650 USD per week and Corporate 1000 USD. We had 187 people reconfirming attendance: - 90 fully sponsored - 31 professionals - 2 corporate - 10 with only sponsored accommodation - 13 with only sponsored food (12 locals and 1 international attendee) - 39 who were hosted somewhere else (most locals but some international people too) * Debconf 13* I think the most close situation to DebConf13 in le camp is Debconf 9. The accommodation is not ideal so while we can expect some people just paying and staying and le camp, many others will look for an alternative accommodation. Given le camp is in a place isolated, I fear some people not finding alternatives easily might give up in attending this year. While the number of people reconfirming attendance to DebConf 8 and 9 and similar, DebConf 8 had a much higher number of professional. I think this is due people found good quality-price for the 300 EUR the professional had to pay. I think we'll totally lose corporate attendees because they will choose hotel+car over paying. Then we'll lose some professionals who: - won't go because they don't like the accommodation and their company won't pay them anything else - won't go
Re: [Debconf-team] A better budget analysis
On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 02:23:16PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: On Dienstag, 30. Oktober 2012, Michael Banck wrote: I don't think that would be a problem, but I think it would also be problematic to put professionals into dorms. As I understand, there are only a limited amount of other rooms (how many?) which we could use for professionals (who would pay more). there is only one dorm (with 32 sleeping places). If I understood right, the 32 sleeping bed dorm is: http://layer-acht.org/fotos/670_Switzerland_DC13-pre/20121027_027_Sm.jpg.61.html the rest are regular rooms with beds. (though I agree people who pay should get a 2 or 4 people room, if they want to.) And what you call regular rooms with beds are like: http://layer-acht.org/fotos/670_Switzerland_DC13-pre/20121027_023_Sm.jpg.57.html With 12 places in bunk beds ? ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] A better budget analysis
On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 04:25:10PM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote: On Dienstag, 30. Oktober 2012, Ana Guerrero wrote: If I understood right, the 32 sleeping bed dorm is: http://layer-acht.org/fotos/670_Switzerland_DC13-pre/20121027_027_Sm.jpg.61 .html yes the rest are regular rooms with beds. (though I agree people who pay should get a 2 or 4 people room, if they want to.) And what you call regular rooms with beds are like: http://layer-acht.org/fotos/670_Switzerland_DC13-pre/20121027_023_Sm.jpg.57 .html With 12 places in bunk beds ? yes, there are 2 rooms like this, iirc. (and I didnt suggest to put coorp/prof attendees in these big rooms, those should go in 2-4 people rooms - unless they _like_ bigger rooms :) The number of room per size, thanks to Cate, is at: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/LeCamp/Rooms We have: Normal rooms (49 people) - 4 individual rooms - 22 twin bed rooms - 1 triple room Big rooms (68 people) - 10 4-beds room - 2 5-beds room - 3 6-beds room Huge rooms (207 people) - 6 8-beds room - 2 12-beds room (http://layer-acht.org/fotos/670_Switzerland_DC13-pre/20121027_023_Sm.jpg.57) - 1 13-beds room - 2 14-beds room - 1 16-beds room - 1 20-beds room - 1 26-beds room - 1 32 beds room (http://layer-acht.org/fotos/670_Switzerland_DC13-pre/20121027_023_Sm.jpg.57) So the normal rooms would go mostly to corporate/sponsor, big rooms are the only ones who could serve be for upgrade fee and everybody else (sponsored) go to the huge rooms list. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Travel sponsorship proposal
On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 07:34:51PM -0400, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote: I'd propose that we have a bigger amount of raters for travel $ allocation. And people from the core teams (orga, travel sponsorship etc) would just provide the guidelines for them, but not join the raters' team. If we don't use a rating system provided by penta/whatever it will be harder to achieve. So I'd go to improve/simplify what we have today, but not to leave it behind. No, no, this thread is not to disccuss how the travel sponsorship team should take the decisions. The team can keep using the same rate system that it was in penta if they desire to do so, just not using the web interface (probably will need a secretary to keep track of this) or just whatever system they agree on. The point is whatever rating system we use: - there should be communication with the person asking sponsorship if people have a question (it happened in the past and the team had to 'guess' information about the candidate and it was in detriment of the candidate...) - based in the feedback communication from the applicant the committee can update their ratings/opinions. This wasn't happening before. - should encourage only people who really need travel sponsorship. Right now we have a form web and a plenty of people just ask money because it is easy and if it works, they get money. And they don't need it to go to debconf. - There should be some track of how requests are handled, it will be, of course, restricted. But with penta the closest thing was some comments in the web not everybody was reading since the first rater might never go back to read the comments other put in the candidate. And the best idea I got to do things this way is just doing it via the old reliable mail system in top of some ticket system... Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [Debconf13-localteam] Updates from Le Camp meeting
On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:35:34PM +0200, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote: ... be best (this would mean 3. to 17. august). This year quite some people left one day early because they wanted to be home on Sunday to restart work on Monday. Could this be because a lot of people had to take a transanlatic (or transpacific) flight and the only way of being back at work in Monday was leaving in Saturday? I checked quickly DC11 room accomodation, that I expect being more similar to DC13 that DC12, and most of the people left in Sunday (remember we had 2 full buses rented in early Sunday). Most of the people leaving in Saturday where people from non European countries. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Meeting with Le Camp
On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 09:54:49PM +0200, Christian PERRIER wrote: Quoting Martin Zobel-Helas (zo...@ftbfs.de): ... Does this mean there is a hard limit of 350 people to be allowed to come to debconf? If yes, this is a no-go for this location. Well, we *knew* about that when voting for this location. 350 is a really high number. And in the case we reach this number, and we have, say 400 attendees, I'm confident we can arrange something with the campsite nearby. IMHO the problem will be sponsoring so many attendees, not the bed places! :) Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Room allocation (Re: Final hotel numbers)
On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 03:27:10PM +0100, Moray Allan wrote: On Thu, 2012-06-21 at 08:24 -0600, Henning Sprang wrote: Is there anybody doing room allocation already? I have the info required for Seminole and can help/do it myself if someone gives some direction on where/how to start. I'll happily join you (but have no prior experience) cate is also willing to help, I think, and Ana should be able to help whoever works on this by sharing her prior experience. I can do it. it is a work hard to share between to peam, however, you will need a person in-site once the conference has started. I can do now the first accommodation that might change later during debcamp+debconf and another person in site can take over then. I will put the spreadsheet all the relevants comments. Leandro, send me the information from the hotels when you have it, it is fine if it is in Spanish. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] DC13.ch - Local Team Meeting Minutes - 2012-06-18
On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 06:54:16PM +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: * DECISION: Wed. 5 September 2012, 18:45, Bern. * INFO: Romands would appreciate more meetings in Lausanne. * INFO: Philipp would appreciate more meetings in St-Gall. Hey, Just for curiosity, have you considered trying to have the meetings by IRC? They don't need to be public if you still want to talk some details privately. This also might allow some people who can not afford going to the meetings to join and help. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [Soc-coordination] Sponsoring DebConf for Summer of code students
[Discussion about having GSOC students to go to DebConf skip] Hi, Thanks everybody who wants to help! So for managing all the stuff about asking students, mailing google and so on, who wants to volunteer? Thanks, Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [Soc-coordination] Sponsoring DebConf for Summer of code students
On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 04:56:43PM +0200, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote: Hi During the first IRC status meeting I had today with the Summer of Code student I'm mentoring together with Per Andersson the topic of wheter she planned to go to DebConf or not came up. it turned out that she did not yet know about DebConf and did not consider it at all. I guess the situation might be similar for other GSOC students. IMHO going to DebConf could make a big difference for a GSOC project. Getting more involved into the community increases the chances that these people will stay active in the project even after summer of code. Therefore I propose to make an exception for these students so that they can still register for sponsored food and accommodation until 3th June. What do others think? One problem might be that most students don't have the money to fund their own travel to nicaragua. Should we ask the DPL to fund another DebConf newbies program for those from Debian money? This might be a bit problematic as we don't have much money for normal travel sponsorship at the moment at all. Hi, I heartly agree it is worthwhile having the students attending at debconf. It really can make a difference if they go there to meet their mentors (and people related to their project), they held a session about their project, get some feedback from the community, etc. In previous years, some students have attended to DebConf with their trip funded by Google and at least one year, we completed this fund using the 500USD allocated to the mentors who *agreed* to use this money to fund more students attending. It was up to DebConf budget paying lodging and food for the students. I thought about it this year but I did not raise the topic with the other organization mentors because several reasons: - looking at the last meeting before the end of the sponsorship deadline, it seemed that there was still not money for sponsoring lodging to all the attendees who asked. So we could not promise to the students: go to debconf and you will get food and bed for free. - we need to ask money to Google. In the case they accept, it will be more or less a fixed budget for 2-3 students. (we have 15 students) - Most of the students are in Europe or India and transportation to Nicaragua is *expensive* from outside central america. Even with the money from the mentors (*) we only could sponsor *travel* to a max 4-5 students. We have 15 students this year, how are we going to choose between all them? They started coding this week, it is very hard to know who will enjoy more debconf. (*) And some of the mentors will be using the money to sponsor their own trip already. - The students needs some hand-holding. No one of the admin orga are attending to DebConf this year (in some cases because the uncertainty of travel funding). This happens with the mentors too, and as said above, it is not so worthwhile to have the student going there if their mentor is not going. It is kind of a hard having to follow the list and debconf stuff to help students and so on when you can't go... Ana PS: Not so fun but we can encourage students to go to some Debian event in their continent. ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] [fwd: a little help with DebConf11 sponsorship]
On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:58:59AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: [ re-sent, now with the correct -team address, sorry ] Heya, JFYI, recently I've got a few worried emails about reimbursements, like the one you can find below (forwarded with Lior's permission). It looks like people are worried about not having heard back about reimbursements. I don't think that delay is the problem here --- delays are understandable, especially during VAC-likely period --- but rather not having heard back from the sponsoring team. Maybe someone from herb can post a brief status update on debconf-announce about this? Many thanks for your work on handling the reimbursements! Cheers. Just a quick note for people still waiting the reimbursements from FFIS (Europe). My reimbursement arrived today, if yours did not show in your account yet, it will probably appear tomorrow or so :) Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Fwd: san juan del sur NOT managua
On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 08:30:39AM -0700, Dave Taht wrote: I would argue more strongly in favor of the more relaxed, fun SJDS area for a conference over managua. There are sufficient hotels, etc, to fit in lots of geeks... as well as surf, music, and good food... and I have lots of contacts down there that could help sort it out. Hi, The place where DebConf is being held every year is choosen between the people who offered to host DebConf in their city/provice or a nearby place they thought it was more appropiate. The DebConf team has also set some guidelines and not every place is OK for a DebConf. If you want to have DebConf in any place, get people from this city/province presenting a bid. If San Juan del Sur is so fun, people can head there for holidays after DebConf. Ana PS: BTW, last time I checked there were women in all the cities from Nicaragua... -- Forwarded message -- From: Alexander Reichle-Schmehl toli...@debian.org Date: Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 1:15 AM Subject: Re: san juan del sur NOT managua To: Dave Taht dave.t...@gmail.com Hi Dave! * Dave Taht dave.t...@gmail.com [110820 02:38]: I think San Juan Del sur is a VASTLY superior place to have debconf than managua. I lived in SJDS for 4 years. It's got surf, women, music, a nightlife managua... not so much. I'm sorry, but I'm not the right point of contact for that. Please contect our organisation teams via debconf-team@lists.debconf.org (global team; public english mailing list) or debconf12-localt...@lists.debconf.org (local team; public spanish mailing list). Best Regards, Alexander -- Dave Täht SKYPE: davetaht US Tel: 1-239-829-5608 http://the-edge.blogspot.com ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Actual food numbers
On Mon, Aug 08, 2011 at 09:13:43AM +0200, Christian PERRIER wrote: Quoting Richard Darst (r...@zgib.net): Anyone who knows can just add them to here (or to debconf-data svn): http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/Food It is quite likely (wild guess only, though) that we find out that the number of *lunch* meals is significantly lower than dinner. This might be an artefact of DebConf11: I have noticed that more and more people were skipping lunch because it was served on tables (nopt a buffet) at the hotel and was indeed really long. Yeah. Quick meal somewhere around the main street and then siesta was a lot of better. The food ended being too repetitive. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Special sponsorship
On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 10:59:43AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: What I've failed to see thus far in this thread are alternative proposals. How could we choose the members of the herb team in a transparent manner? Would a call for volunteers on a public mailing list be enough? Has it been tried in the past? With which results? Last year there was a public call: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/03/msg7.html I know of people who had problems but since the team met sooner than this year[0], there was time for the rejected people to ask reconsidering this decision. We also had a BOF in dc10 about this. [0] No blaming this year's people to meet so late, it is just how things happened. And then we had, in the past, the rule to not rate yourself. Which in the end turned out to punish people for doing the work (no rate, lower score, WAY down in the sponsorship, and that just because you wanted to help DebConf). Which changed the policy to Rate yourself. The rest of the team WILL rate you down if your request is insane. Which did happen, this year too. I've heard this argument before (I believe it was last year in New York, talking with members of the DebConf10 herb time). It sounded convincing back then, but a bit less so now. In particular: if instead of taking the sum of scores we take the average a large deal of the problem should go away. You will still have the problem that the average for herb team members is taken on a smaller sample than for non-herb team members, but if the team is large enough (which I believe was a very good feature of this year team) the difference should be meaningless. Has that option been considered in the past? I was part of the team in dc8 and dc9, and yes, in the system used in dc8 (Argentina), you were losing a vote because it was something like everybody from the team rate all the members in a IRC meeting with no/abstain/yes, then we gave points to that: - no (0) - abstain (0.5) - yes (1) With this system, you had to abstain in voting on yourself so you supposedly lost half a point there. (disclaimer, I do not remember it exactly how the points were, but you get the idea) Then in dc9, we used penta for that and people in the team asking for sponsorship, didn't vote on themselves, so we just looked at the average where all the others members have voted and the problem did not exist. AFAIK, the penta system has been used again in dc10 and dc11 with an IRC meeting once everybody has rated. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Special sponsorship
On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:05:29AM +0200, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote: for us, too. In the sponsorship form we don't ask for much information, but Clint didn't provided even the minimum of information needed to make the decision. Sadly, it is quite common for people to file the data and forget about it until the reconfirmation phase (when travel sponsorship has already rated people), same goes with talks! Was the possibility of pinging Clint, and the other people without data, via email considered? Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Letter from NGO DIVA
Hi Josif, [Just an personal view here, do NOT take this as a Debian response of any sort] On Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 05:02:31PM +0200, NVO DIVA wrote: Government of Republika Srpska gave us a guarantee to 150.000€. Please do note that besides paying expenses for accommodation and food for all the attendees that requested the same in this number there is also the cost of Venue (which is incredibly expensive); our own organized transport with buses/shuttles; DayTrip; T-Shirts/bags/printing; use of pools; transport and accommodation for reputable guests from Google and Canonical and as well as the accommodation of whole DIVA team. Members of NGO DIVA have done all their work for 2 years now on volunteer principles without any charges and all expenses we had so far to organize it all we covered using our own financial resources. A lot of this stuff has been pushed by the localteam after the debian team has told them repetitively we did not need them! We do not need luxury hotels, pools, we weren't interested in inviting people from Google (and apparently you have invited also people from Canonical :?!) and a lot of more things like this. You can find a lot of evidence of this thru the list archives. My understading is DIVA was involved in all this as part of the localteam. Today we got a list of attendees that require accommodation/food, from very beginning we planned this whole conference using certain statistics and the number of attendees we got today is not congruent with the statistics/number we had, Could you please share the numbers you have? I was taking a look to the people now to start doing the room allocation and my impression is we have less people than in dc7 and dc10 and a similar number to dc8. Also, we have a larger number of people from the country where the conference is being held coming than in previous years. It would be also interesting to have a view to your budget, it might happen we are counting some expenses we shouldn't? Thanks in your help to make DebConf possible, Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
[Debconf-team] I did not get any email regarding sponsorship
Hi! Somebody else from the team already informed me about my status, but I haven't gotten any email regarding travel sponsorship. Reporting it here in case there were a problem with more emails, If you are waiting for travel sponsorship and you did not get an email, ask. Please, whoever who sent the email check what happened, I would like to know if there is any problem with my d.o email setup. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Draft confirmation message
On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 04:03:23PM +0200, Adnan Hodzic wrote: Well I'd like to consult with you before we have this sent out. First of all I'd like to see a line that will say to tidy up your registration details, from country you're coming from and etc ... So besides reconfirmation this ends up as data sanitation process as well. In previous years, we never needed to know from which country every attendee is coming. What makes it different this year? ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
Re: [Debconf-team] Draft confirmation message
On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Ana Guerrero a...@debian.org wrote: On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 04:03:23PM +0200, Adnan Hodzic wrote: Well I'd like to consult with you before we have this sent out. First of all I'd like to see a line that will say to tidy up your registration details, from country you're coming from and etc ... So besides reconfirmation this ends up as data sanitation process as well. In previous years, we never needed to know from which country every attendee is coming. What makes it different this year? On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 06:43:38PM +0200, Adnan Hodzic wrote: Please don't make this harder on me as it already is. Government and Hotels want *exact* data. IMO which is their right if they are welcoming somebody in their country and their facilities the least they can have is information about who they are welcoming. You are asking us to be accurate and when we ask for more information with the purpose of being exact you tell us we are making things harder... It is important to know why the information is needed because then it might happen the information we put in penta isn't what you need. If we are in the case the hotel have the policy to know the citizenship of the people they are hosting and you want to give this information in advance, penta won't work because it asks your *address* and not everybody happens to live in a country they are citizens (thus they have an id card/passport) We even have people with 2 citizenships and they can use one in penta and another when they arrive to bosnia or to register with the hotel... OTOH, as you have stated earlier, people from a lot of european countries do not need more than their id card or passport to travel to Bosnia, so I don't get why the goverment needs now this data. Adnan, I understand you are with pre-debconf panic, but don't freak out, I am sure all this small details you are so concerned now won't be a problem. Ana ___ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
