Here's the e-mail from Pete that I mentioned last night at the meeting. Jeremy
-----Original Message----- From: Pete Krawczyk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 2:10 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: YAPC::NA 2007 in Houston Howdy! I went by and I thought I'd add some notes to your wiki at http://www.yapchouston.org/wiki/wiki.cgi - but I can't. The big things I want to mention are: Sponsorship shouldn't be included in your base proposal, so the chairs know you're relying on money you will have rather than money that may not show up. The biggest dock your proposal can take is not being "fiscally responsible" - so don't count on money you won't have. Part of the reason we were selected is because we based everything on what we could minimally do, and promised to expand it out from there. Explain your money - show every dollar - you'll be rewarded in the end for it. Plan on 50-75 people not paying: you'll want to give your speakers and volunteers "free admission". We didn't have a template for our proposal, so don't use it as an end-all reference. Make it distinctly yours, and you'll have a much better chance of being noticed. (We didn't even get to see prior proposals.) Pick someone to be czar. Josh was it for us this year, even though there were a couple of us in the middle of it. You can't spend all day bickering - at the end of the day you need to pick something and go to make it successful. Facilities: Make sure you count A/V costs, staffing costs, and things like that with your venue prices. These are things that are dropped "on the floor" in proposals that will show you've put a lot of effort and research into your proposal. The big thing is this: make it affordable, make it accessible, and base it on $100 a head - we were lucky to get the right to a price increase. It was the first one since YAPC 2001 - which went from $70 to $85. Sponsors: start early, look local. The "big ones" will show up when you poke them. But you need lots of sponsors. And know what they'll get if they sponsor you - have all the options available. Don't be afraid to shill a bit for a few extra bucks, but don't let a sponsor dictate anything about the conference to you, either. And for the record, our final YAPC cost will be around $35-40K. It's only because of sponsors that we'll be in the black this year. But the reason it costs so much is because we were able to get sponsors to cover a lot of our bigger costs before we decided to make them. For example, we found a place that would do a Chicago-style deep dish pizza buffet for about a third of our final choice - Dave & Busters. But because we had a couple sponsors step up, we could afford the latter in the end. Finally, come talk to me or Josh during your stay in Chicago. Sure, we'll be swamped, but there's no quicker way to know what you'll be getting into than to observe what we're doing those last few days. It took us 8 months to pull everything together - 8 months of almost daily attention, care and feeding. You'll have some help, but it'll be up to you and your core committee to make it happen. Good luck with your bid. -Pete K, YAPC::NA 2006 co-chair -- Pete Krawczyk petek at ignore dot us http://www.petekrawczyk.com/ _______________________________________________ Houston mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/houston
