Dear all, As we discussed last Tuesday, registration of event was opened at 7/5, and we received 1193 registrations in 85 minutes. However, some of them registered more then once, because a bug of new registration system of this year. There are about 900 unique participants will attend to the event. But we only planned to release 610 seats, there are 310 more people then we expected. We have examined the log, we found the first 610 seats were all booked in 15 minutes. (You can see the enclosed chart for the numbers of first 30 minutes.) And there are even more people like to attend the event, but they missed the open registration day at 7/5. To response for highly expectation of thousand of participants, we like to open more seats for them, as you suggested in the irc meeting last Tuesday. The first idea is to have one more conference room for the fifth track, since we have rejected about 30 talks for sharing 37.5% of conference program with GNOME.Asia Summit. But it turns out that the team can not afford 5th track, it cost too much human resources, and it's way to difficult to manage at one month before the event. So , our approaches are - * We are now working with a local Blog Services Provider to provide live streaming for the event. * We have booked 2 more conference rooms for people who can not have seats in the main venue. We will provide broadcasting of the talks in these rooms, so we can have 400 more seats for participants. However, to maintain basic *quality* and make participants *comfortable* in the meetings. There are more extra expenses, like venue renting, lunch boxes, insurance, water, walkie talkie, etc. (see budget list for more details[1]) Which will cost us about NTD 202,600 (about 6,300 USD). That will make us running a risky cash flow, and we will not save cash as reserve fund for COSCUP 2011. (Since COSCUP grows more then 50% every year, we always save 25% of sponsorship cash as revolving fund for next year. In fact, our 10K USD revolving fund will be all used for the event of this year.) The current sponsorship status are * COSCUP - raised about 40K USD * GASC - raised about 5K USD In order to afford the extra costs and maintain a healthy financial status, we need more funding. In fact, COSCUP team has already secured two more sponsors after 7/5. Other than COSCUP team's own cost like travel sponsorship for speakers/staffs, meetings, web sites, there are about 33K USD for shared cost of two teams. We do need to find more financial support for the event, and I like to ask your help for funding. I hope we can discuss and find solutions in the irc meeting of 7/13. Thanks. [1] http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgIA9Z5Z55vldGhmSThMblNzZ3BLczl5QVhrZEdvQVE Best Regards -Rex
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