On 09 May 2005, at 11:59, Torsten Schlabach wrote:
Hi,
After last year's GetTogether, we decided to untie the GT from any commercial involvement (however small there ever was any), making sure the GT is an event organized by and for the Cocoon community.
Do you mean: No sponsoring?
Basically yes, though it's safe to say that this won't exactly make much difference. All "profit" made during last year's GTs has been put safely aside for a new edition, so there's _some_ budget to start from. The idea has always been that the event should be self-supporting - even with its modest admission fees - because it's all volunteer work and we try to outsource as few stuff as possible. The biggest costs are handouts, facilities and A/V. Catering cost should be paying itself with admission fees - but that only works if you can gather as much registrations upfront, so that the number of ordered meals is correct.
Alternatives? The question is if you want to make this a Ghent thing in
the long run or if you want to move it around in Europe. I am not sure if
moving it around might attract new / more people or not.
I don't know. About Ghent: I'm willing to volunteer the same amount of time as every year, running errands and the like, if the event is run in Ghent. If not, someone close to the venue should be willing to volunteer that same amount of time.
I'm not a very efficient time manager, but I guess I've been spending about two to three weeks every year so far - of course some things are becoming routine stuff now. Marc has been spending about a week or so as well on invoicing and billing.
* are you up for volunteering?
Yes!
Great!
Can't last year's infrastructure be re-used?
Last year's application was hacked together - nothing to be proud of, and for this year we really should make online payment less painful (Paypal is expensive, and quite a few people want real invoices). Besides, last year's edition was still co-hosted on the Orixo website, which needs to change as well.
In the end, things could be as simple as: coming up with a layout, copy lots of stuff from last years, book a deal with an online billing service, leach as much from last year's "registration application" as possible.
Content-management wise, running the website alongside the cocoondev.org (Daisy) machinerie would definitely help compared to last year.
* call for proposals and ideas
What do you mean? Setting specific topics or an overall theme in the CFP?
"Everything". ;)
A theme would be nice but might be spreading the icing too thin on the cake. We need to send out a CFP, select speeches, come up with an agenda + time schedule, etc.
I booked the large room of last year for two consecutive days, so we also need to discuss what we want to do with it (Hackathon-wise I mean).
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
