On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 07:23:27PM -0400, Uri Guttman wrote: > >>>>> "BC" == Bob Clancy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > BC> I work for a company near Kendall Square and the Kendall/MIT > BC> T-stop (very near the Residence Inn). > > BC> Our building has some common rooms on one floor of our building > BC> that are often used by various tennants in the buiding for things > BC> such as company meetings. I've mentioned the idea of > BC> yapc::boston(?cambridge?) to the person who might be able to make > BC> a decision whether this space could be used, and he wants to > BC> schedule a meeting with me in order to get more details. > > BC> First off, our space is maybe big enough to act as 3 good sized > BC> classrooms, or as 1 large room. Security in our building is > BC> tight, and the landlord might also say "no", so there are a lot of > BC> bridges we must cross. > > yapc needs three rooms with 100+ seats in each for the track talks and > one larger room with 300+ seats.
I'd prefer to call that 3 rooms (2 of 150+, 1 of 100+) and as well, one room with capacity 300+ (which can be one or a joint combination of 2 or 3 of the "small" rooms). It's impossible to get the tracks so evenly balanced that exactly 1/3 of the people go to each track; but it's also not certain that you can predict in advance which sessions will be the most and least popular (you just have to be wrong once to have an overflowing room). If you have a large room that converts to 2 smaller rooms, there needs to be some time between single sessions (keynotes, lightning talks perhaps, town hall, banquet/auction if that is not held on a cruise ship or somewhere else off-site) and multi-track sessions. The ballroom we used in Toronto was filled with round tables that had chairs all around - that meant that when the dividing wall was rolled in, the "front" of the separate room was 90 degrees away from the direction that had been the "front" of the combined rooms, but people just shuffled the chairs that were now facing away from the stage. A typical chairs-only setup would have required a long rime operation to turn the rows of chairs 90 degrees and relink them. (The round table layout meant that the room could hold fewer people, but it was big enough that the less efficient layout was adequate for our numbers.) A large room that converts to 3 rooms would probably be either too large for the joint sessions, or too small to handle the more popular of the tracked sessions. We also had a 4'th room for one day in Toronto for the full-day perl intro that brian d foy gave - my son reports that there were 50-70 people in that session (and I know that some of whom did not attend any other sessions in the conference). Being able to mix in sessions appopriate for beginners in conjunction with the usual collection of sessions that appeal to more experienced programmers was well received (and also was the key enabler for some of our sponsorship funding - one company sent 12 people just for that day and paid the full [3-day] $85 registration for each and, I think, paid some extra sponsorship as well). -- _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
