During this whole time of registrations I've been keep a close eye on numbers, mostly on http://rkd.zgib.net/http/debconf/registration-data.txt and last night we had a meeting where we concluded that reconfirmation date should be 3rd of July.
After careful consideration and talking to other parties we need somethings changed. During our lunch with minister, he asked us when we could have the final numbers, after Moray Holger and I consulted we told him 3 to max 4 weeks. Three weeks mark is just today and I believe we still don't have what's called final numbers. If you take a look at http://rkd.zgib.net/http/debconf/registration-data.txt you'll see that we have something that could be our final number ("444") which is fine but if you take a closer look at these numbers first thing you'll notice is our of these numbers 138 have not even selected what country they are coming from. Now, government, hotels and everybody is highly flexible but they want *exact* numbers, and we're all but being exact right now. If anything I want exact numbers, in a week or two we'll have press release with the president and I wan't to be able to tell him exact number of who's coming. These numbers mean a whole lot to us, for example visas, our attendees who have visa problems will be granted visas upon arrival to our country, how can they be given a visa if they haven't even set which country they are coming from? Also Arrival dates are pretty empty. How are we supposed to even send those shuttles if we don't even have these dates? Same case with Tshirts and numerous other things. On wiki I wrote about accommodation (http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/Accommodation) I put how much beds we'll get from each hotel, when I spoke to director of Bosna I told him there will be 60 to 80 people in first week, now according to our numbers there will be 120. This is fine, but as long as it's not some random people signing up for DebCamp just like that. I personally know couple of Bosnians that registered for DebCamp because they said "why not?" In the end number of people is not a problem, none of it is, but all we need is exact numbers so I know how to deal with each situation. IE, for hotel it makes a huge difference if it's 60 or 120 people in first week, and for government it also makes a huge difference as it's a difference between ~100k km. Since last night, I've talked to everybody (diva, govt, hotels) and I told you they want their numbers ASAP, now since ASAP was a vogue term now they would like to have final numbers by next Monday (13th). I also have a proposition on how we're going to get these numbers. We send out an email to all the registered participants to fill in all the fields they can! One of the most important ones being to fill out the country they are coming from, in case they are coming to DebCamp their plan for same one, accommodation, dietary, tshirt size and so on. As I said their DebConf badge cards will play big role, and it's only one dependency after another. In case person doesn't fill these fields by the time of reconfirmation email they automatically get "disqualified" for sponsorship. Also I suggest we have reconfirmation email sent on 24-th (June) as one month before DebConf should be a good remainder and when they should have an idea if they can come or not. Again if you have any other suggestions let me know. Adnan _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
