[guadec-list] Notes/thoughts from yesterday's site visits

[aday gnome org]

Hi all,

Yesterday members of the organising team did a bunch of site visits. Javier, Lene, Sam and I went to some potential venues for social events. I also went to the conference and unconference venues.

I've added some notes and photos to the wiki, with the details of what we found out:

 * https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2017/SocialEvents

 * https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2017/Unconference

I also have some more personal thoughts about the venues that I wanted to share before I forget them!

Main venue

This is really fantastic; possibly the best GUADEC venue I've ever seen. Odd thoughts:

 * There's a water fountain; which raises the possibility of selling/giving away branded water bottles for people to fill

 * If they'll let us put them in, there's space for ping pong or table football. Having some games around could be fun!

 * It might be nice to have picnic blankets, deck chairs or bean bags on the lawn in front of the venue.

 * We ought to find out where we can hang banners, both inside and outside.

 * I didn't see any notice boards, so we ought to find out if they have any mobile ones we can use. There are a bunch of things we might want to put on them.

 * I didn't get chance to find out about local places to get coffee from; it would be good to have some places to recommend.

The Shed

This will be the venue for the unconference/BoF days, and is a great space for the purpose.

One issue we might have is that there aren't that many separate rooms - we have a total of three spaces, two of which are quite large. We can subdivide them, but noise could be an issue. Likewise, it might be hard to devote separate spaces to workshops while the BoFs are going on. We should probably decide early on how we want to split up the space, as this might determine what kind of activities we can organise.

The people at the shed are well connected with the local digital scene, so we ought to reach out to them when we have materials to circulate.

Allan