[EBUG] Re: food and socials...

[Paul Richards]

--On Wednesday, October 31, 2001 09:24:09 +0000 Paul Robinson
<paul at akita.co.uk> wrote:

> On Oct 31, Paul Richards <paul at freebsd-services.com> wrote:
> 
>> CC'd the EU list as well so they now the score too.
> 
> Cheers.
>  
>> conference budget doesn't cover it. Otherwise, people are on their own as
>> far as lunch/breakfast/Friday night is concerned.
> 
> To be honest - and perhaps I'm showing my tendancy to go to more corporate
> glitzy events than academic - I hadn't expected anything else other than
> conference entry. Put it this way - I'm attending to listen to and talk
> with people about BSD, not eat food. :-)

That's what I'm hoping :-)
  
>> What I'll probably do instead is arrange local venues where we can all go
>> together (probably several given the numbers involved).
> 
> Just out of curiosity, what are the numbers looking like now then? 

We're around the 120 mark at the moment. Not stunning but adequate. All the
basics are covered, we've got a good schedule, the network/terminal room is
in hand and the social events are organised so we should have a lot of fun
as well as some good discussions.

What's lacking are the fringe benefits, there won't be much of a conference
pack or anything like that, though we do have a few things so people won't
go home empty handed :-)
 
> With regards to venues, you're going to have problems, I suspect. Saturday
> will be the busiest night of the week for them, and it's going to be
> impossible to secure numbers until earlier that day. Good luck. :-)
  
>> If there are any potential sponsors out there who have been waiting for
>> the last minute then now is that time.....
> 
> Have you shone the sponsor-light into the sky? Or rung the sponsor-phone?
> (think batman... I know, it's early...)

Yes, but we only had a battery powered torch :-)

We've got some basics covered, like the terminal room (Apple), network
connection (Easynet) and some books from O'Reilly but we didn't convince
anyone to give us any cash. Effectively the difference between registration
fees and costs is coming out of my own pocket so it'd be nice to get some
help from the community to ease the burden.

It's still not too late to sponsor something, even small amounts of money
will make a big difference to the success of the event at this point.

We'd really like people to exhibit actually, we've got a lot of unused
space and if we could recoup the costs of that space by getting more
exhibitors that would give us some more spending money. The other area to
help out would be to take an ad in the proceedings.

As Nik mentioned in one of his emails, this isn't a corporate run event,
it's being organised at a grass-roots level. Anyone who feels they can make
some contribution can do so.

Paul Richards
FreeBSD Services Ltd
http://www.freebsd-services.com