As it was written in the Book of Ulrich Gemkow gemkow@ikr.uni-stuttgart.de:
- Local organisation
I propose to form a local organisation group (LOG).
I think that's a good idea. I wish I was there so I could help.
We should get a feeling for the "financial" aspects (who pays what and what are the limits). It is no problem to find a catering service (we have one about 200m near the building) for coffee and breakfast/lunch or a good pizza service, but somebody has to decide how much this may cost and provide some kind of deficit guarantee.
Jeremy, I just realized I didn't put anything on the web pages about travel assistance. Should I? Either way, should we use some of the Wine funds for this? Should we consider charging everyone a nominal fee to take care of things like this?
I think we'll need two simple breakfasts - coffee, tea, bagels, and something like donuts. We'll also need two simple lunches - we had pizza last year and it worked well.
I will try to hire students from our students organisation, so that there will be (including me) good support from people who know the location and the building.
If a list of the people expected to come will be available, we can prepare name plates.
I don't think that's too important. Maybe we could just get some stickers that say "Hello, my name is.."
We will some help for cleaning after the conference - the universities cleaning staff will not be available at sunday and the rooms must be in "perfect" condition on monday morning at 8am (because then the lectures start).
I can help. My mopping skills are incredible.
- Location/Traveling
(I included all the location info on the web page.)
The small room has about 80 seats, the two bigger ones 150 and 300 seats. If more or bigger rooms are needed, this should be no problem, the biggest one in the building (which is not available on Saturdays morning) has 850 seats :-)
Excellent! That should be more than sufficient. We should set one up as a break room / lunch room and use another for the actual conference.
We can provide markers which guide the guests from the railway station and the parking site to the entry of the building.
Good idea.
I can help with this as well. I'm currently planning on leaving here on Tuesday, so I should be there on Wednesday to help with anything that needs to be done. Is that too early though? If I arrived on Thursday, would it be ok? It doesn't really matter to me.
- Equipment
LC-Projectors should be no problem - each of the halls has a projector installed. Overhead-projectors and blackboards are available too. The bigger halls have microphone, the small room does not need one in our experience.
We may want to consider using the 150-seat hall for presentations. Last year we had a very small room and we still needed the microphone.
Internet access is a little bit more difficult - not from a technical point of view but because of security concerns in our central computing center which is responsible for the campus network. You should give me a feeling what services are needed, i.e.
- is WWW-access through a proxy enough (probably not)
- do you need direct outgoing connections (ssh, ...)
- do you think that incoming connections to (Mail, ...) are required (which would be rather difficult)
I can't think of why we would need any incoming connections. It would be nice to be able to telnet, ftp, ssh/scp, and irc though.
Our institute can provide WLAN-APs and switches for interconnection of notebooks.
I can bring an AP as well, if necessary.
I can provide some equipment for audio/video archiving of the conference but have no own experience in doing so.
I don't think audio/video is much of a concern. Last year it was A LOT more trouble than it was worth. In fact, it was worth nothing since the tapes were never converted. If someone wants to do this on their own, I guess we could let them. If Aric really wants to hold a boom mic, we can let him.
-Brian