Hi, It has been requested that those of us that have concerns about the DebConf13 location should formally raise them with the DPL and the DebConf chairs. I regret that it has come to this, but since I still do have a lot of concerns, I'm following this path.
My main concerns were expressed in a mail I sent last night [1], after spending a good part of the past weekend discussing several issues with local team and global team members. Summarizing, these concerns refer mainly to the fact that the location chosen is "in the middle of nowhere", with bad access to shops and alternative accommodation, while at the same time offering accommodation that we know from past experience many attendees won't find good enough, thus having less developers attending. Apart from me, Ana Guerrero [2] and Steve Langasek [3] also sent their own analysis regarding the accommodation situation. In Ana's case, she concluded as me that the location is not adequate for DebConf, in Steve's case, his conclusion was that in order to not give people a too unpleasant experience the maximum number of attendees needs to be reduced more than for past european DebConfs. There are also concerns about the costs, the budget has been analyzed by Richard Darst [4], with the conclusion that we would need to reduce the size of the conference quite a lot in order to make it affordable. Either by reducing the number of sponsored attendees or by reducing the amount of DebConf days. During the past months, many other people have raised their concerns both on list and on IRC. Most of these concerns have not been resolved yet. Some other options have been analyzed, but not in much depth, because many local-team members feel that the chosen location is very good, even though a number of past and future attendees and organizers disagree. Last week, there was a 90 minute team meeting [5], which after a lot of discussion, tiredness and hurt feelings, ended up in an agreement to try to negotiate this week with the director of the proposed venue, the possibility of signing a contract for only one week, or one week of full occupancy and one partial week, because we can't be certain of having the money to pay for two full weeks at their rates. If things can be worked out, then contract would be signed this same week. Because of all this, I'm asking to please not sign the contract with LeCamp and explore better options for DebConf13. I'm making this motion knowing that there is very little time to make it and that it's very last minute, but I'm doing it because I'm convinced that this is not a good location to hold DebConf. Let me just state that no matter what happens, I'll be both attending DebConf13 and participating in the orga-team from now on. Be it in helping with the investigation of new locations or with making the current location work as good as possible. [1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.conference.team/8937 [2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.conference.team/8950 [3] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.conference.team/8945 [4] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.conference.team/8880 [5] http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2012/debconf-team.2012-11-22-20.00.log.html -- Besos, Marga _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
