Robert Schweikert - 9:32 13.04.12 wrote:
On 04/13/2012 08:00 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
On Thursday 12 April 2012 23:57:53 Jos Poortvliet wrote:
So here's a pleasant surprise.
Michal and Theo are involved in the just-starting organization of a 'reboot' of a well known local event (12 years of history): LinuxExpo. This used to be organized by a conference-company but they've announced not to do that this year.
A local team has decided to do it instead, working with the Technical University of Praha (biggest technical university in the country, I'm told). The team consists of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Gentoo people as well as chief editors of the 3 major Linux magazine and university people. Michal and Theo had an appointment to discuss the conference and I tagged along. The team was unsure about their scope: go international or not? Theo suggested to have a Gentoo side-event with about 50-70 people. We then suggested to co-locate with openSUSE Conf!
The team liked the idea and we went over the basics: - Location? 3 metro stops from the city center, 2 stops from the old city - Rooms: all we want. 300 + 180 + 180 large rooms, plenty of small rooms. - Catering: there is university catering but we can do what we want. - Branding: go nuts. - Date: please one week earlier than we wanted to do at KC. - How many days: they wanted 2 days (sat& sun) but we can have Thur and Fri if we pay a bit. - What do they think: The team loves it. They get international exposure 'for free'. The university was so excited they promised to move whatever is needed in their schedule to give us space on Thur and Fri... - openSUSE 'identity': We start on Thur, Sat we open up. Enough time to just hang with geeko's. - CfP: We should collaborate with our CfP - there is plenty of overlap between the local and global teams (gentoo, openSUSE& LinuxExpo). Just think of a keynote by Greg KH :D - Team: we work with the university and other people so it'll save us all work. - Costs: It looks like we can afford it, it is in the same price range as KC. We have a final cost picture tomorrow, Monday latest. - Costs2: We and the Gentoo people need travel support - but the LinuxExpo has an estimated total costs of about 1500 euro as they don't do that, have a free location (university) and free marketing (the magazine people!). - Sponsoring: we need to figure out the exact details but nobody is trying to get rich of this so it should work out fine. - Timeframe: we can probably have it all fixed by end of next week! - Marketing: Awesomeness of course. With the main local magazines part of the organization, we'll have all the local attention we want. internationally, this looks really good too. We want to collaborate, this is our chance! - University: all big geeks. They run Gentoo with KDE desktops on their computers in the work rooms :D - Language: We will have both Czech and English tracks. Bit of shuffling should make sure there's always plenty going on for both language groups. - Feeling: less cozy, more 'university'. Big building, not particularly pretty or sweet. We need to bring some of that good old huggyness there. Couches etc., not sure if there's a good spot for that but I think we can find something. - But but but didn't we sign something with KC already: no, Alan asked Michael to hold off until we can decide on this new opportunity.
In short.
Crazy surprise, but everyone seems to love the idea and we can do it. It fits our requirements and has many benefits.
I made a quick impression - it's much shorter as it was less prepared than the KC one, but here you go: http://youtu.be/EFd4pXcBeDQ
Tomorrow around 15:00 EU time we have a meeting to discuss this, feedback please asap so we can bring that to the table. We have to decide quickly.
/Jos
We just heard back that unfortunately the university would NOT be available on Thursday and Friday.
Bummer. I would not recommend to have osc in two locations. In the end tow locations really means two conferences and we do not get the benefits we would be after. Plus we'd have to shuffle a lot of stuff around.
In the end, there might be some non-perfect solutions to that. We will
know for sure on Monday/Tuesday. Worst case scenario is that big rooms
might be available just on specific times, not through the all day, but
as we ant to have big talks mainly during weekend when the audience will
be bigger, we might manage with just several big talks some smaller ones
and doing a lot of BoFs and workshops in the first two days. We'l know
more on Monday/Tuesday, will report back, but we decided, that we don't
want to move it to the hotel and I personally think, there will be some
workaround to get it on University and make it awesome even if we will
have some troubles with big rooms.
--
Michal Hrusecky