Hi all, I'm pretty silent around here, so I don't know if my opinion holds any weight any more, but here are a few things I would encourage you to consider in venue selection: 1. Total travel cost: the sum of all travel costs of all participants. This will stay relatively stable from one year to the next, meaning: * if it costs more, on average, to attend, you will have fewer attendees * if it costs less, on average, you will have more attendees 2. Centers of gravity: where are most of the people who you really, really want to attend. Where do they live? The total travel cost constraint works for this subgroup too. 3. Goals of the conference: when I started it, the goal was to enable smaller projects to come together and meet, and have critical mass of users and developers of free software creative tools to have a conference, and create meaningful dialog between them. Which venues best match up to that goal? Is that still the goal? Elaborating what we hope to achieve with the conference will make it easier to compare bids. And, like Forest Gump, that's all I have to say about that. Cheers, Dave. <div class="gmail_quote">On 24 Apr 2013 09:15, "Femke Snelting" <<a href="mailto:snelting@collectifs.net">snelting@collectifs.net</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> Dear all, In the LGM-organisers meeting that we held on the last day of LGM in Madrid we made a few decisions <a href="http://lgm2013.titanpad.com/4" target="_blank">http://lgm2013.titanpad.com/4</a> In other words, we decided to consider four proposals for LGM 2014 and established a relay person for each of these options (Montreal: Louis Desjardins, Medellin: Maria Leandro, Leipzig: Mario Behling, Buenos Aires: Dave Crossland). We realized that we needed to revise and republish our criteria for selecting a venue. They have been indeed discussed in 2010 but they are currently not publicly accessible. Promoters of each venue have the possibility to revise and/or clarify their proposals in the coming two weeks. We will decide the venue for 2014 in an IRC meeting and will have a selection made by May 15. The "committee" taking responsible for this decision, is the group that was present at the meeting. Only if these people can not come to a clear consensus, the debate will be opened up to the larger community. We also established that the deadline for proposing a venue for LGM 2015 should be minimum 3 months before LGM 2014 so that the decision can be made beforehand and announced at the meeting. Let's keep with this procedure? It's probably not perfect but to me it seems that things are put in place to make a reasonable choice. Femke _______________________________________________ Libre-graphics-meeting mailing list <a href="mailto:Libre-graphics-meeting@lists.freedesktop.org" target="_blank">Libre-graphics-meeting@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libre-graphics-meeting" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libre-graphics-meeting</a> </blockquote></div>