On Sat, 2010-04-17 at 00:20 +0300, Strainu wrote:

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Michael Loeffler michl@novell.com wrote:

...

For the venue we're aiming for the same venue we had last year - Berufsförderungswerk Nürnberg [2] - which is perfect from a conference perspective and has 75 hotel rooms on-site with a reasonable price. Downside was internet connectivity (2Mbit) but they meanwhile can offer 4Mbit and work on getting 10Mbit till mid of this year. So, with some luck this downside should be solved till the conference takes place.

As a participant at last year's conference I have several issues to report regarding Berufsförderungswerk:

• it was excessively far for people coming from downtown - over 1

hour 15 in commuting. The main problem was the bus, which was only coming each half hour, and if I remember correctly had a different ticket price. I think a location that one can reach by tram would be more appropriate for that city.

Out of curiosity, are you resident of Nuremberg or did you choose to stay in hotel in downtown area? If staying at hotel, why didn't you stay at the conference center hotel? IIRC we had some spare rooms left.

I did not use public transit when I was in Nuremberg, so I have no idea what the system is like, and can't comment. But do understand that one of the reasons we used this location was because of the price. The rooms were very cheap compared to inner city.

The conference itself was free to everyone and many rooms were sponsored. I think the tradeoff for staying outside of the main city was well worth it, and I didn't really mind it that much.

• in 2010 lack of Internet sucks (especially for geeks). There are no

good points here; we're not monks ore slaves that should concentrate only on the matter at hand, we're mature people that can focus during the presentations and do whatever they like in the rest of the time

Agreed. Definitely showed poor preparation by the conference center. We taught them a lesson big time last year. :-) It was more frustrating for me because I am from US so my cell phone service did not even work in EU and therefore, I could not even check messages on my phone.

But as Michl said, they are working to upgrade their service by this summer and hopefully that issue will be mostly resolved in time for our arrival.

• the place outside the conference rooms was pretty small. The

solution was to talk outside the building, but the later the conference is in the year, the more chances there are of rain. The organizers should take this into account too.

I'm not sure I agree completely. I think we did alright. We had the main hallway, the cafeteria area, the lounge area. And most people went outside mainly to smoke or get some sun. The space I think is adequate for the ~200 attendees.

But you raise a valid point about potential rain. Still, considering the pricing of this location, its a fair tradeoff, and even renting a big awning for the week to put outside the front area would still be far cheaper than going elsewhere.

The location of Nuremberg is good also, because many of the developers are based in Nuremberg, and thus we don't have to worry about their travel costs. This allowed us to further put more of the budget into the conference itself.

The purpose of the conference isn't to live like kings for a week (though wouldn't it be nice?) but to get all of our valued contributors together once a year affordably.

Instead of focusing our energy on finding different (and potentially more expensive) locations, let's start to focus on how we can make the content of the conference itself even more useful than before.

Thanks! Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Board Member openSUSE Marketing Team Lead GNOME-A11y Team Outreach