On 3/25/2010 9:53 PM, Jerrad Pierce wrote:
funding isn't the primary mit issue. it is finding a school sponsor.
Which takes time (=money). Time's not the only reason YAPC::Boston hasn't happened in the past, but in previous recountings it has sounded like a major factor.
I don't think it's that they're worried about the money; we could do fundraising and front necessary money if needed. (Even if the space is cheap we still need money for publicity, hororaria and expenses for the major speakers, and so forth.) The real point is that an MIT sponsor makes the space affordable; if we have to pay for it at commercial-conference rates it costs way too much. And yes, MIT does host some outside conferences during the summer and makes serious money on them; that's why we have to convince them that this is in effect an inside conference.
So yes, we need buy-in from somebody on the inside if we want this to happen. Convince the potential sponsor that we'll do the heavy lifting, we just need the seal of approval.
Something else that might help would be to have plan of which rooms
one would like to use, and especially trying to make use of some the lesser known/desirable spaces like Barton Theater, the lecture halls in building 34, La Sala de Puerto Rico, etc. Everyone wants Stata and Sloan, but if we can make due with other spaces it ought to make it easier to okay... easier scheduling around other events, and lower value/cost spaces (and therefore diminished risk) since there's less competition?
Plenty of spaces available for the various smaller sessions; Sloan has the advantage of having a bunch of them in one place but if we don't care about that there are many more good lecture rooms. (I know of some in buildings 4 and 6 for example.) The hardest scheduling part would be a larger theater for any mass gatherings like keynote speeches; for those you probably need the big rooms like 26-100, 10-250, and the like, and they're in limited supply.
We need a bit more definition to the problem. How many people are likely to show up? How many conference tracks would there be? Those two things help figure out how many people we need to be able to seat in one place at one time. For a look at what happened last year check http://yapc10.org/yn2009/schedule -- but I don't know the numbers.
And there is the question of conference dinners if we want to get involved with that. You can get Tech Catering to cater events but it's expensive and the food isn't very good; there are other caterers you can work with for casual meals on campus but mostly they don't do sit-down dinners. And I don't know of a lot of good spaces on-campus for a large sit-down dinner during the summer. (The otherwise suitable Walker Dining Hall lacks air conditioning.) Given that it's Boston/Cambridge we could just not bother and organize expeditions to Central Square and the like.
Has anybody ever looked into the question of dorm spaces? Can we even get them, and if so how affordable would they be?
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