Hi! Here are the minutes of what we talked last Monday afternoon/night. It's a bit long, because we talked about a lot of things.
About finishing with DC7: The Final Report is almost done. Once the report is done, Steve will send out the sponsor bags. The idea is that it will be done in the next two weeks. The last couple of financial bits have to come in (1 bill, 1 sponsor). The last bundle of T-shirts have been shipped. About DebConf Dates: There's a wiki page with the pro's and con's of each pair of weeks [1], but we are missing the information about other conferences that might clash. Moray volunteered to start the page [2]. If you have knowledge of any other conferences that might be worth mentioning, please edit the page. The decision will be taken on the next IRC meeting. After that, we will book the conference-rooms, thus blocking the dates in the Hotel. [1]: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Dates [2]: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/OtherConfs About PentaBarf: We want to have an updated version of Penta, that includes a lot of things that we wanted to have fixed. Jörg and Damian will work on that. An "Assassins" module is being planned, in order to eliminate human error. There were quite a bunch of things that didn't go that well with Penta last year. Since it doesn't make sense to discuss all of them in IRC, we decided we should do a wikipage with all those things. This hasn't been started yet. About Sponsors: The local Sponsors team: Marcela and Martín Albisetti (beuno) will join the main Sponsors team, in which we hope most of this year's team will remain. We don't have certain numbers, but work with an estimated budget of USD 120k, and an estimated number of attendees of about 350 for DebConf and 50 for DebCamp. For existing Sponsors, we want to start contacting them about DebConf8 as soon as the Final Report is out. We are going to try out the Sponsors categories that were already discussed at the beginning of this year. The difference between each sponsor will be shown in the size of their logos and the placement on the T-shirt. Martín Albisetti and Marcela will bring a proposal about amounts of money and names for the categories, for the next IRC meeting. About Money Transfers: Money stuff is a bit complicated in Argentina. They charge us a minimum fixed amount per transfer, and thus it doesn't make much sense to receive many small transfers, but rather few big transfers. Apparently, the problems that we had this year with SPI won't be much of a problem next year, since there's a "delegation" in place that allows us to deal with DebConf money without much trouble from the the SPI treasurer. Also, apparently, SPI will be implementing a way of paying them by Credit Card which would be useful for our paying attendees (see below). So, we should have a small list of accounts where smaller Sponsors would transfer the money, and then we can get it in bigger bunches. About Attendee Categories: I suggested the introduction of attendee categories, similar as how it is done for linux.conf.au (It seems both Phil and other corporate people had already suggested this in the past). The basic idea is to have participants that make their company pay for their attendance fee. So, divide participants in 3 groups: "Individuals" (they don't pay), "Professionals" (they pay for their stay, i.e. U$S 250 the week), and "Corporate" (they pay more, e.g. U$S 1000). Companies wouldn't expect to get anything for attendance fees, but we can list them in a separate page that shows all the companies that have attendees at the conf. We can also ask the "Individuals" if they want to pay. The main problem with this idea is getting hold of the money. If SPI were to accept payments done by Credit Card, it would make the billing for the attendance fee much easier. About WiFi: It doesn't make much sense to get a WiFi sponsor to lend equipment (as Aruba), since the Hotel is already equipped with wireless, and we can't lay our own cables between floors (we can do as much as we want in the conference/hacklab floor). Also, the hotel has spots for adding extra APs in case they are needed. About Customs: We are investigating the necessary papers for importing hardware for a short term. Damian is in charge of figuring out all the legal stuff needed for this. About Press: Martin Krafft will be in charge of the press team for DebConf8, but he needs more locals to contact him. He's already sent a mail to the localteam list [3], but nobody has replied yet. I will send another one, trying to get more people to join the team. The idea would be to try to get press contacts during the next year, so that when the mailing moment comes, things are easier. [3]: http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20070820.095913.05dc819b.en.html About the Website: Martín Ferrari (Tincho) is our webmaster. After some internal talks, we decided to go with static pages, using server-side-includes for the header/footer/menu. This is how the DC6 site was done. We like it. We don't like any CMS. We don't want our main website to be a wiki. We would like to be able to give access to commits to the website to people that might not necessarily need access to the whole debconf-data repo. Jörg said that this can be accomplished by having a separate svn for the website. One important thing is to have the website as the main source for information. This year, some things were in Penta, some in the Wiki, some in the static pages at ~joerg. About Future Meeting dates: We decided to meet the third Monday of every month, at 19:00 UTC. Next meeting will then be October 15th, 19:00 UTC. The agenda [4]: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Meetings -- Besos, Marga _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
