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

[Ernest Chiang <dwchiang gmail com>]

Dear Pockey, Fred, and Rex,

Thanks for pointing out and some inputs about current finance situation. Let's try to collect some more information or to find some more possible solutions before tomorrow IRC Meeting together :)

We may need some finance related data to help we all judging in IRC meeting, such as: how much money we may need if we don't cut budget items, how many possible way to get more funding, etc.

Let's make our joint-conference happy and great :)

ernest,

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Frederic Muller <fred beijinglug org> wrote:

Dear Rex,

There's no reason to be so dramatic, I'm not trying to kill anything or anybody. The survey results you're giving me have no relation AT ALL with the point at hand. I was merely offering the attendees to decide, rather than us.

Besides I'm not saying we CANNOT raise MORE money, I said 5K will be impossible (considering we did struggle to get the initial 5K). We can surely support you as much as it is in our abilities and try to raise more money.

But you're right, let's talk about it tomorrow.

Fred

On 07/12/2010 01:21 PM, Rex Tsai wrote:

Hi, Fred

Actually, my original request is looking for more funding, not the
suggestions of cutting budgets.

In COSCUP 2009, 156 attendees filled out the post-event survey, 86%
rating talks as 4 points out of 5 or above, and 97.4% willing
recommend their relatives to attend COSCUP. I can tell you that people
love the event, and they are crazy about it this year. It's not only
we invited great speakers, provided informative talks,  have
environment for discussions. It's also we care about participants, and
create joyful activities for them.  Joy (??) is the main spiritual of
COSCUP, and these resources (BoF, food) are the fundamental of
spiritual. Please try not to kill it for us.

It seems it's impossible for you or GNOME foundation to raise more
money, we got the message. We will discuss what's alternative
solutions in irc meeting tomorrow.

Regards
-Rex

2010/7/12 Frederic Muller<fred beijinglug org>:
 

Dear Rex,

For regularly attending conferences I can say that food at any conference is
my last concern and motivation to attend. A successful conference boils down
to famous speakers (and the great non-famous one i get to discover), quality
of talks (not so marketing, but information packed, and discussions which
happened, new or strengthening project/community arisen from the
conference). If I want good food.... i stay at home and cook myself :D

And this has nothing with the fact that it will be impossible for us to
raise an extra 5K, this is a separate issue.

What I can suggest, since we have all registered members email address is to
put up a poll asking why they attend a conference with difference reasons to
rate, or ask them to chose between less people and more food, or less food
and more people. Then we'll know exactly what our participants think.

I hope we can find a good way that make you feel comfortable as well, but I
would chose more people and less food any day of the week.

Fred

On 07/12/2010 12:24 PM, Rex Tsai wrote:
   

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