Hello, 2009/3/15 Jacob Hallén <[email protected]>: > While this is really great news, it raises some new issues. > > Traditionally, about one third of the attendees have registered in the Early > Bird, with the cutoff being about 6 weeks before the conference. If we > extrapolate, we may be looking at 400-700 people wanting to attend. The > uncertainty comes out of not having had an Extra Early Bird registration > before. There is no way we can accomodate 700 people in the booked > facilities.
The extrapolation may be invalid as this year we've started earlier and publicised better, so maybe the upper limit is 600. Basically up until now we've been planning on 250 for budget purposes, and thinking we may have to go up to 400. Because of the economic uncertainty maybe more people have booked early to get the Extra Early Bird rate, and we'll get fewer people later. Who knows! Only time will tell. > - How many people can we have before we run into the limits of the facilities? about 600. > - What is the capacity of each room, and how do we ensure that everyone who > wants to attend a talk gets to do so? The largest room has a nominal capacity of 520, this allows for a symphony orchestra as well so we can probably make 600. The next room we've booked holds 154, plus a chamber orchestra, so we can push this to 170 (we got 180 in at PyCon UK 2007). The next one holds 140, but I think this is too much for this room, let's call it 120. The fourth room we have booked holds 100, and this figure is probably correct. There are a number of other rooms as well with capacities of around 40. > - What is the limiting factor? Is it the size of the smallest room for talks, > or is it the size of the common area (for lunches and exhibitors), or some > other factor? I think there are three relevant factors: * the size of the largest room for plenary sessions * our ability to estimate demand for individual talks * lunch (possibly the biggest problem) I think that, given that not everyone wishes to attend a talk at the same time, the sensible limit would be 600. > > - How do we handle hundreds of people wanting to recharge theor laptops? We can hire some of the practice rooms as laptop charging stations. > - What are our reserve alternatives? I guess that people can flow into the > outdoors for breaks, since the conference is held in July, but do we have any > other reserves? * Hire other, smaller, rooms. * See if we can hire rooms at the nearby College of Food * Maybe hire space at the CBSO Centre, 10 minutes walk. * Or the Convention Centre, 5 minutes, probably too expensive. And let's stagger the lunch break. Have a two hour overall lunch session, with some talks running into that period by 30 minutes, and some starting 30 minutes before the end of the lunch. And we could relieve the pressure a bit by giving some people vouchers for nearby sandwich bars (of which there are several). > I think we need to set a limit on how many people we can accomodate. Let's say 600 then. If we get anywhere near that I'll be amazed though. > I think we may have to ask the delegates what talks they would like to attend, > in order to schedule the right talks for the right rooms. Unfortunately that is a little bit of a circular argument, because they can't see what the options are until we do a schedule, and we can't do a schedule until they've said what they want to go to. Maybe we use our best judgement, then ask for the delegates to state their preferences and then rejig it as necessary. I think we can manage this year, but if it's really popular next year may be a problem: bigger facilities are probably more expensive, I'll start checking... Best wishes, John -- > söndagen den 15 mars 2009 skrev John Pinner: >> Hello Everyone, >> >> I closed Extra Early Bird this morning, at this point we had 142 >> delegates registered. >> >> Since then we have had one more registration, at the 'standard' early bird >> rate. Which makes a total of 143 delegates registered, over three months >> out from the conference, so we are guaranteed a good attendance which >> should help getting sponsorship. Well done everybody! >> >> Self-proclaimed delegate experience is: >> >> Novice : 10 ( 6.99%) >> Basic : 26 (18.18%) >> Experienced : 95 (66.43%) >> Guru : 12 ( 8.39%) >> >> Registrations by country are: >> >> Austria : 1 >> Belgium : 2 >> Finland : 2 >> France : 2 >> Germany : 20 >> Hungary : 1 >> Italy : 1 >> Lithuania : 3 >> Netherlands : 6 >> Norway : 5 >> Poland : 3 >> Romania : 1 >> Spain : 2 >> Sweden : 5 >> Ukraine : 2 >> United Kingdom : 85 >> United States : 2 >> >> I think that we can conclude that our publicity is pretty good (thanks >> to Martin Hellwig!) but we need to improve it in Europe. Suggestions >> please. >> >> Thanks, >> >> John >> -- >> _______________________________________________ >> Europython-improve mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve > > > _______________________________________________ > Europython-improve mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve > _______________________________________________ Europython-improve mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve
