Re: [COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010] Seeking for financial support.

[Rex Tsai <chihchun kalug linux org tw>]

Hi, Pockey

Thanks for suggestion.

However, We trend to not cut snacks / drinks for BoF, breaks. Current
quantity of food is already not sufficient for all participant. (since
we uses same budget for more pople)

As I said in the last mail, we like to maintain *quality* of
conference and make participants *comfortable*. If we are really short
for cash, we would prefer to politely turn participants down by reject
their registration, but not cut the resources we can provide for
participants.

If GASC and GNOME foundation can support more then 10k USD (includes
sponsorship of Google,Oracle) for the event, then I am sure we can
make the event a great success. :-)

Regards
-Rex

2010/7/12 Pockey <pockey beijinglug org>:
> Dear Rex,
>
> Thanks for your updates, we will definitely do our best to involve more,
> if we cannot get more funding from our side due to the limited time,
> maybe let's also discuss about how to cut cost in general? e.g. cut the
> snacks / drinks for BoF and 会场餐点 breaks？ we can save 6363.63 USD on
> this. While this money can be used to cover the extra cost, let's
> discuss tomorrow.
>
> Regards,
> Pockey
>
> On Sat, 2010-07-10 at 22:39 +0800, Rex Tsai wrote:
>> 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
>
>