[Promotion] GUADEC 2006

[Martijn Klingens]

Hi Dave,

On Thursday 06 July 2006 09:19, Dave Neary wrote:
> Thanks Wade! By the way, I really like the mini-conference model that
> KDE are using for sound, core libs and so on. It's a good model to
> follow for really productive working meetings. Where are you guys
> getting the money to get people together, and have you had trouble
> getting key people together with work commitments?

Being one of the people from the organization team of the KDE Multimedia 
Meeting I'll chime in.

First of all, the smaller meetings have a lot smaller budgets and are more 
focused. This makes it possible to attract different sponsors. For a Guadec 
or aKademy a sponsor who shells out 5000 euro is mediocre at best, and 
sponsoring 500 euro is hardly worth the overhead.

For the multimedia meeting, however, such 500-euro sponsorships are still 
quite interesting, opening the door to many companies who wouldn't sponsor 
Guadec or aKademy.

We still had to send out sponsor letters and do all the work that you know 
from Guadec though. I have not been involved with the KDE Four Core meeting 
that's currently going on in Norway, but since the announcement lists only 
Trolltech and Suse/Novell as sponsors I suspect that they were approached 
directly without the formal procedure that we used.

As for commitments, most attendees to the multimedia meeting were still 
students. Also, the meeting was a long weekend (Fri-Sun), so with a day of 
traveling at both ends you need at most three days off. Especially within 
Europe that's not a problem with the relatively large amount of days off we 
have (still not enough for all the KDE stuff I'd like to do though ;) ).

The KDE Four Core meeting is an entire week for many, which would be a bigger 
strain. Don't know about troubles getting people committed. I'd say there 
must have been, but I really don't know and given the attendee list pretty 
much all important people are around, so it worked out anyway :)

One tip for smaller meetings btw: try to get people from only a single 
continent together. The multimedia meeting had people from Australia, Brazil 
and the USA over to the Netherlands, which required quite some extra 
budget...

-- 
Martijn