Ok, so it sounds like the general consensus is to plan to have LAS GNOME next year, and potentially target the spring of 2018.
Here are the immediate next steps that I see, am I missing any others?:
Tell the Board about this update. @Nuritzi will do this today.
Tell any targeted individuals that we already talked to about the update. @All - Should we also send an update to foundation-list and engagement-list? I'll do this tomorrow unless I hear differently by tonight that I shouldn't.
Tell any sponsors we have already reached out to about the update. @Sri - is this something you can help with?
Decide what LAS GNOME should be in 2018. We need to decide if it can be hosted internationally or not, how formal of a bid process we need to have, and we need to get the infrastructure set up as Sri said.
Perhaps we can do a call this week to talk about LAS GNOME 2018.
I think an Engagement Hackfest would be great -- I'll add an item to the Engagement team agenda so we can discuss it on Friday!
Best,
Nuritzi
On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
+1 as well. I think it would be quite difficult and stressful for everyone involved. Instead I propose that we have an engagement and website hackfest and spend a couple of days working on improving things. We have a GitLab migration also that we could also be looking into. So, possible hackfests:
* Developer flow/Continuous hackfest
* Engagement hackfest
* Website Hackfest
* Every Detail Matters hackfest - great for students
* Bugsquash/Onboarding/Newcomers hackfest
The money could be used to set these up at Stanford or at the Endless office. We can also talk about what we want in the next LAS GNOME conference and set up an infrastructure to support next year.
As for LAS GNOME, I think we are in a good position to start asking for money from big corps as they do their financial planning starting now. We can use the next few months to start building the fundraising and outreach engine to make this conference successful. Last year, we were just getting comfortable with the concepts around LAS GNOME, and this year I think as a team we are much more familiar with what's going on.
Ok, after reading everyone's opinions + talking to Cosimo, here's my recommendation (and reasoning below):
Recommendation: Let's postpone LAS GNOME to Spring of 2018. We should consider having an open bid process for it internationally.
If there's interest in doing a North American Summit, we could do it in November over Veteran's Day (Nov 10 - 12th), and I can talk to Endless to see if we can donate space for it here in SF.
Should we do a vote on this? If so, then here it is:
VOTE: Postpone LAS GNOME this year (your +1 means not having it this year).
Sadly, I'm +1
Best,
Nuritzi
Why postpone LAS GNOME:
Venue fell through, the new option is not ideal either in location (a bit isolated) nor timing (weekend).
Website update hasn't progressed. Haven't seen any movement on archiving the old website and setting up a new one.
Too tight of a timeline to get great attendance.
If we actively plan for Spring of 2018, we can approach sponsors at the beginning of their funding cycle.
Nuritzi, thanks for your effort especially on the venue. It is quite unfortunate that that happened.
It does sound like SLAC is a little isolated, with the clearance requirements too, so it may deter last-minute walk-ins. Even if they have a few other pros as you listed, I still feel that we would benefit more from postponing the event to next year; we’ll have more time for practically everything — participants’ travel planning/sponsorship from Foundation (if applicable), call for talks, venue options, sponsorships (!).
That said, if we still want to have some sort of event, a hackfest would be more appropriate — informal, casual, basically less logistics to figure out in a very short time frame.
> On 22 Aug 2017, at 6:36 AM, Link Dupont <link sub-pop net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2017-08-21 at 22:40 -0700, Nuritzi Sanchez wrote:
>> The not as good:
>> - unavailable on weekends. It is available Weds - Friday the week we want it
>> or else Tuesday - Friday the week of November 13th.
>> - does feel a bit isolated, too bad it's not closer to main campus. As I
>> mentioned before, main campus is a ~5 min bus ride away
>>
>> ... so we could move the event to Weds Nov 1 - 4 and potentially try our luck
>> on the main campus for continued BoFs. There are spaces you can just walk into
>> with whiteboards. Or, we may want to do a weekday event only the week of the
>> 13th.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>> ..........................
>
> Given that there is a focus on students and student engagement for this round,
> being unavailable on weekends and not located on the main Stanford campus will
> make it more difficult for students to attend. Was the emphasis on student
> groups the driving force behind *choosing* a university, or was it the other way
> around?
>
