Ksummit 2007 requirements

Matthew Wilcox matthew at wil.cx
Mon Jul 24 20:01:59 EDT 2006


On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 03:53:15PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Roughly ball-park figures at standard rates for a meeting room, en-suite 
> accommodation, breakfast and morning and afternoon coffee looks to be 
> about ?70 per person per day. Requirements for multiple rooms may raise 
> that a little, but with luck the fact that colleges like playing off 
> against each other when it comes to their perceived provision of 
> computing resources may also drop that somewhat. Without accommodation, 
> things are obviously much less expensive (looking much more like ?15 per 
> person a day). Included accommodation would generally be on the same 
> site as the conference, with 24 hour access.

In terms of raw numbers, we're fewer than 100 people.  What we've had for
the last few years in Ottawa is a big room with maybe 15 circular tables,
each with about 8 chairs.  There's a stage at the front, and the tables
would probably seat 12, but there's a 4-chair gap pointed at the stage.
We have a microphone at each table, and power for our laptops.  While we
use a wireless network currently (because we're guinea pigs for OLS),
having a wired hub at each table would also be a perfectly acceptable
way of supplying intarweb.  I would think that 10Mbit to the outside
world would be acceptable (though I imagine if we do it in a college
we'll get gigabit ;-)

We've also had a couple of smaller rooms available for BOFs, maybe
seating 40 people.  I don't think we're necessarily set on this format,
but whatever setup we come up with needs to be amenable to holding
ad-hoc discussions that everyone in the room can hear.

For accommodation, I'm not the only geek who travels with wife (and
progressively more with kids [1] too) ... are there facilities for married
couples?  And does en-suite mean a shower in this particular context?

> Lunch and dinner vary in cost - sandwich-style lunch probably runs at 
> about ?4-5 in town, sit-down 3-course formal dinner in college would be 
> about ?25 (and would need pre-booking). 

I think that would be an excellent opening-night dinner.  Again, the
last few years, what we've had is a superb dinner on Sunday night,
then Monday and Tuesday, we had muffins and pastries for breakfast
and a sub-par conference centre provided lunch (think school dinners
...).  Monday night also gave us a dinner so we could be dragged back
for a BOF two hours later.

I'll be happy if we don't have stuff scheduled for the evening next
year, but this isn't the place to discuss that.

> Everything needs VAT adding where appropriate.

For the non-Brits on the list, VAT is the equivalent of sales tax.  It
runs at 17.5%, but isn't chargable on food and other necessities of
life.  And newspapers.  Accommodation does attract VAT.  Retail prices
are normally quoted with VAT added, but 'trade' prices are quoted
without VAT.

[1] Danielle would like to make it quite clear that, like Pia Waugh [2],
she is also not pregnant.

[2] http://perkypants.org/blog/2006/07/15/swimming-upstream/



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