On Fri, 2009-08-28 at 13:00 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
Chris,
I think you asked earlier -- although I can't seem to put my hands on the specific email -- about how widely to publicize FUDCon. (At least I'll be splitting this thread out now, hope that helps.) You noted that there might be as many as several hundred students interested in attending, and I think you were concerned that might overwhelm our ability to provide effective event support.
We could limit the need to provide limitless funding if we do one or more of the following:
Limit gifts (T-shirt, FUDPub coverage) to a pre-arranged number of pre-registrants.
Seek sponsorship from one or more places. Seneca is already giving us free facilities so I'm loath to go there, but perhaps the user education track gives us a way to seek sponsorship elsewhere.
A further thought about Point #1: Running the pre-registration process through the wiki works tolerably well and requires little effort on our part, but it's not going to be easy for planning technical sessions. We may need to find and set up conference management somewhere on Fedora infrastructure.
Paul,
This is the direction I'm going:
* Promoting FUDCon to the smaller number of students who are strongly plugging into the project as contributors, such as my Build & Release students (i.e., have a FAS2 account, using bugzilla, on IRC, etc).
* Encouraging other students not to register online but to attend the barcamp day on Saturday. This will relieve pressure on the t-shirt & FUDPub expenses if they are restricted to registered attendees. (OTOH, maybe I should get them to sign up somewhere -- perhaps on the Seneca wiki -- so we do have a count for room-size purposes).
-Chris