Re: GUADEC 2007 in the UK?

[Paul Cooper <pgc openadvantage org>]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 21:52 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> Bastien Nocera wrote:
[snip]
> * Who is definitely willing to help organise it?
> 
> We need a definitive working group. If people would like to put their 
> names down on a list I think it would definitely help.

I'd definitely be up for helping.

> 
> * Where would be suitable?
> 
> We've already basically ruled out London. I think Birmingham would be a 
> good choice in terms of getting people there. Basically any place close 
> to an international airport and with a University would be a suitable 
> candidate.

I think Birmingham is a good choice in terms of big city, not too
expensive, good transport links, etc, plus we have a growing ecosystem
of FOSS companies in the West Midlands (and the premier UK FOSS event
LugRadioLive is in nearby Wolverhampton). To be more specific one venue
we investigated for a conference was the Conservatoire (i.e. music
school). 

Plus points;

* Location: Just up the road from New Street train station, surrounded
by central birmingham amenities, food, pubs, shops, etc.

* Suitable mix of rooms; Large 500 seat lecture theatre, 200 seat
theatre, couple of smaller class/practice rooms (around 50 people if I
remember).

* Self contained; I would guess we would try to book more or less the
whole place, which would mean we were the only people there and there
isn't a rest of the building to get lost in.

* 3 local lugs to draw volunteers from (Birmingham, Wolves, Coventry).

* Some relevant local implementation's. Clockwork have rolled out a
large desktop installation and use Gnome (and develop 'desktop'
software, albeit with Qt), Birmingham Council have just rolled out Gnome
desktop throughout their libraries, and depending on results may look to
push it out more widely. The MOST project have rolled out a number of
Gnome desktops to voluntary groups around the region. 

Negatives;

* Not used to hosting tech conferences, so we'd probably have to work
out how to bring in internet and wireless ourselves (Stuttgart had the
same problem and had some amazing wireless uplink thing going on).

* Only going to be available in UCE University holidays; this is usually
exactly when GUADEC is planned but will mean we won't have much
flexibility.

* While there is probably plenty of cheap accommodation to be had I'm
not sure how much of it is near the Centre. The UCE has a halls nearby
but I don't know if it's vacant through the holiday. This isn't too bad
though as the cheap halls in Stuttgart were a couple of bus rides out of
the Centre by all accounts.

NB: Full disclosure, the Conservatoire is part of the UCE, and I work
for the UCE, and live in Birmingham.

> * Mini GUADEC
> 
> I've also learnt that there is a proposal to hold GUADEC 2007 in Lyon. 
> I'd still like to propose the UK as GUADEC was held in France in 2000, 
> but has never been held in the UK. It would also really help bring 
> together the GNOME community in the UK, and would probably help the more 
> general FOSS community here too. If GUADEC 2007 is held in the UK, we 
> will definitely need some sort of get together before it anyway, so...
> 
> What I'd also like to propose (and this is something that has been 
> mooted before) is to organise a mini GUADEC sometime this year. This 
> could be done alongside some other event (such as LUG Radio Live, 
> e.t.c), or we could organise our own day somewhere. We'd get a few of 
> the GNOME developers living in the UK to come along and give a some 
> talks and hopefully get some interesting discussions going. So does any 
> one have any suggestions about this, such as where we could hold it, and 
> what we could organise.

I think a mini-GUADEC this year would be great. I would guess the
Foundation Board would look at that as evidence of organisational
ability. LRL would be the easy option, as more or less all we have to do
is get speakers.

Alternatively there are some smaller venues in the Birmingham area that
I could investigate, and depending on the situation we (OpenAdvantage)
might be able to help with costs. But we have plenty of other great
potential venues if we have volunteers on the ground to get is sorted;
Leeds, Manchester, Bristol, Cardiff off the top of my head.

Paul

> -Thomas
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Gnome-uk-list mailing list
> Gnome-uk-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-uk-list
>