[guadec-list] List of things we'd love to see done

["Enver ALTIN" <ealtin gmail com>]

Hi all,

Me, Umit Bozkir and Kerem Can Karakas grouped up on Saturday to enjoy the amazing Bosporus view while talking about free software events coming up in Turkey. For the record, we all live in Istanbul. There's an active free software (user and developer) community here; and we help organize big annual events for more than 5000 visitors every year. "We" means the Turkish Linux Users Association, which has around 1000 members.

We were talking about the Turkish Free Software Conference to take place in Ankara in June 20-21; and it dawned to us that GUADEC is coming nearby.

Thankfully Baris is doing most (if not all) of the preliminary work. Albeit a bit early, we contacted Baris about 6 months ago to offer some help, may need there be. So we decided that we should come up with a list of things that we'd love to see done for GUADEC, and of course we'd love to help with these. Here it goes.

• A stand at the airport, with a big GNOME logo on it. At least one English-speaking volunteer at the stand to be there to prevent people from getting lost in the city.
• A shuttle bus between the common hotels area and the airport.
  
• A team for everything about the transportation in Istanbul. This is roughly a "I'm lost! Help!" or "How do I go to Topkapi Palace" hotline.
• Event organization team for people willing to explore the city. This team would collect the FAQ that will answer to "which museum should we visit?" or "where should we have dinner?" sort of questions and organize tours.
• We'd like to see a dedicated accomodation organization team, there's no other way this problem could be tackled. There are lots of good hotels and hostels around; but availabilty, quality and price is always a concern. Yet, most of these hostels don't have websites with enough pictures so you don't get an idea of the room you have booked until you actually arrive. We'd love to see this solved by a few people actually visiting hotels, getting price quotes for groups, taking photos and writing reviews.
• We'd like to see an appointed visa issues guy. Getting a visa shouldn't be a problem at all, but just in case. People from certain countries may need special help.
  
• Local IT support team. We think this is a must. There will be network, electricity, wiring, IP, firewall, whatever problems and we don't really want people blogging about how bad that broken thing affects their lives.
• We'd probably get some professional help from a local ticket sales office for airline and route planning before it's too late. We could get someone to volunteer for that, and that someone could use Skype or e-mail for easier communication.
• Local press relations. We'd love to see translated press releases appear on IT magazines and national press around here before and after the conference. Creating hype and awareness is important for us.
  
• We'd love to see the entry barrier lowered for people with technical decision making positions in Turkish governmental organizations; so that they can see the people developing the software they use for themselves.
• Govt. people attending means there will be some amount of native Turkish people who don't speak and understand English very well. We've successfully used simultaneous English-to-Turkish translation for certain events in the past, we can most probably use it again at least for large-audience talks in GUADEC. It would be great to add a checkbox like "I would use simultaneous translation if available" to the registration page so we can get an idea about the demand beforehand.
• More hype: In one of the previous events we were able to invite an official to join the opening talk from the Ministry of Transportation (which regulates the IT sector in Turkey). We'd love to do this again, but it looks like it's already a bit late. Well, I agree that this one is too high on the sky.
  
• There are certain people we'd love to see talking at GUADEC and this includes the Pardus project, which is a Linux distribution project primarily funded by The National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology. It looks like their attention is towards aKademy but we definitely should invite them because for now they've become one of the big flags for free software in Turkey.
• We'd love to see a will-do-whatever team. There will be need for local help throughout the conference, and we should be prepared for more demand for resources.

We estimated that we'd need about 20-25 people to get this work done; and getting together and organizing people would need about a week.

Thanks,
-- 
Enver