Summits, Conferences and Meetups workgroup - 2023-01-13

Sent out the email yesterday. Let's hope they get back to me today 🤞

https://share.gultsch.de/daniel/mafeZ2uQU3wrGbMg/CGmHKC-pRsave30NqImFEg.pdf

I didn't yet go through this but I'm just sharing what they send me in response

> In order to make you and offer, I will need to know how many persons you will be. > > If you are more than 15, I will propose to you our conference package, which the price is per person and you have included 3 coffee breaks, lunch and the meeting room itself. > > If you are less than 15, I will need to make the proposal with everything separate.

I did get back to them asking them for just the room rental. Not sure if they do this. But those catering packages are 3-4k for the two days roughly

I mean we gotta eat _something_ and at Cisco we always had food

But idk if the XSF wants to spend that money

Tbh the prices with snacks are slightly more reasonable than I would have thought... But I have absolutely no idea on what money the XSF would be willing to spend

The obvious additional downside of going with the 'catering included' option is that we would fairly soon need a definitive number of people

ralphm: I will ask peter to join

Some sort of middle ground would be to have the (lunch) catering in the hotel replace to dinner and the cab ride to the restaurant. (if we are operating on a budget) Because imho having a nice place to hold the conference is more important than the dinner

And dinner could then be something self organized self paid in the city center

> - 1 meeting room "Harald" - in U-shape for 16 persons - the price is 950€ per day from 09:00 - 17:00 > > You have included: 1 flipchart, 1 screen, 1 LCD projector, Wifi, Pens and notepads and water.

They also listed individual prices for lunch coffee break etc which tbh sound reasonably priced considering that we will be paying 2k for the room anyway. So if we have the budget for a 2k room I might actually be inclined to buy us some coffee too

But no idea what the budget is so...

Do we even pay for Cisco, or is it sponsored? I always assumed the latter

I wouldn't think we pay for that

That wouldn't make sense

We may or may not pay the lunch there

We probably do

This is quite expensive, but probably the expected rate for what it is

Yeah, we (or a sponsor) pays for lunch

> This is quite expensive, but probably the expected rate for what it is Yes to both

Honestly I could have imagined that being even worse...

True

We could look for some Co working space. But I don't think those will be considerably cheaper

Maybe a bit. But not an order of magniute

If hour budget is like 100 Euro I don't even start looking. If our budgets happens to be exactly 1800 I might

It's my understanding that the XSF has some saving but no or little new money coming in. I think the XSF should pay for this even if it eats into the saving. But this will give us a reason to go out looking for new money. Because previously if you donated to the XSF it was unclear what they do with this. And then we could say it's for hosting the summit

Tangent: did anyone actually post a summit announcement to any of the mailing lists??

I thought I saw someone say in xsf@ that multiple had been posted, but I don't see any in a quick search of my inbox

I 100% agree about funding

[Members] FOSDEM 2023 & XMPP Summit 25

From 4 days ago

I think we got "lazy" because sponsors ended up paying for stuff directly, so the XSF didn't have many Brussels-related expenses

It will likely be significantly different this year

Oh, of course

All emails from emus go direct to my spam folder in Gmail (not my choice!)

I tried to set up filters to stop it, but apparently they aren't working or didn't catch these ones

But this could easily be happening to others using Gmail too

I will post a follow-up from Gmail, which might get further visibility. I'll also put in wording to encourage even folks who are only "maybe" to indicate that on the wiki, and also that we may finalize a venue in the coming days and capacity may be limited to the number of people registered

If that sounds reasonable, I'll do it now

To what end? Get a better understanding of room size? Not do it if not more people show up?

I think several people have indicated that they are waiting for an official announcement

I think we should get funding approved

And then send an official invite

I'd like to get an idea of room size, yeah. We have 10 people on the wiki, and we usually get 30-40 on the day. I get that numbers are almost certainly going to be lower this year for various reasons, but I worry if > 6 people are still planning to attend or haven't seen the announcements or just need a nudge/deadline to add themselves to the wiki, we may end up not being able to fit people in

6 feels like a narrow margin

OK. Go ahead. But I don't want this to block board making a decision

I don't think larger rooms will be significantly more expensive. So if we can get approval for like 3k or so we should probably be good

The room also has different seating configurations that would fit more people

Worst case

I don't think we can make a decision before ralphm informs us about the state of Cisco

so I'd rather get ahead of any potential bad news (as we are, having this discussion)

But we need to know confidently if a smaller venue will be acceptable, especially if it affects costs significantly

So I'd rather go into next week knowing we have close to everyone who plans to attend, accounted for

Right now my confidence that there aren't 6 lurkers who just haven't made arrangements yet is low. Adding our names to wiki pages at the last minute is what we do around here :)

I note that the message also only went to members@. The announcement for last year's summit went to many more lists.

But maybe if we're short on space and paying for the venue, we want to keep the advertisement to members??

Without know how much we are willing to spend I can't say anything in this regard.

Usually more people are nice

But I'm also absolutely willing to have a more intimate summit with just those 7 people on the wiki

*10 now

Okay, I'm inclined to repeat the announcement to members@ until we know what we're doing about the venue

There also have been social media announcements I think. So anyone who wanted to see it could have seen it

People are either lazy or simply don't want to go

I suspect the overlap between standards@ (a summit's primary audience) and our Twitter/Mastodon followers is small

Sent

Thanks

sorry i wrote all that from my mobile; now i'm back home and can better look at the details. so the quoted price is for the roon 'Harald' which is 50sqm and seats 22 in U shape; 24 in board room and (worst case) 30 in class room. see: https://www.thonhotels.com/conference/belgium/brussels/thon-hotel-brussels-city-centre/?Persons=10

i think the 16 in the email comes from because i requested 16. so the emails says it fits what ever number of people you said. but it can fit more

Oh well, that's fine then

> daniel: > 2023-01-13 01:29 (GMT+01:00) > But this will give us a reason to go out looking for new money. I was recommending that already

> MattJ: > 2023-01-13 01:32 (GMT+01:00) > All emails from emus go direct to my spam folder in Gmail (not my choice!) fun

> daniel: > 2023-01-13 01:54 (GMT+01:00) > There also have been social media announcements I think. So anyone who wanted to see it could have seen it > People are either lazy or simply don't want to go yes

daniel: thanks for the research

I followed up in this chat. any action on my side I missed / can I do something

The one remaining question is: After what date do we consider Cisco not happening and how many days after that is there going to be a board meeting to confirm funds for the alternate venue

Mo - Wed next week IMO

Im in for a meet almost any time