As it was written in the Book of Jeremy White jwhite@codeweavers.com:
In any event, the offer from WRS is very generous. I do have to admit I am little nervous by the phrase "WRS can pay the rent for the conference venue if we can become a co-organizer of WINEConf"
Hm... yes, what does co-organizer mean?
? Local/regional and German wide press work to jointly market the conference
I know I'm being a stick in the mud on this - but do we really want this? Don't we primarily want to advertise this on the Wine mailing lists and the Wine web pages?
Candidly, I think Wine is a very interesting topic; I suspect we could raise a few hundred people to come to a Wine conference if we wanted to. I was just operating under the assumption that we did not want a Wine *users* conference, but strictly a Wine developers conference.
Please correct me if I'm wrong; mine is only one voice.
I agree - we don't want end users there. This should be developers only. However, if we have an opportunity to draw some developers in who aren't familiar with Wine, I think that's ok. Case in point - maybe someone from KDE or Samba would have some killer idea for integration.
? Suggestions for social program & infrastructure for attendees (in part by our sister organization Regio Stuttgart Marketing)
Great! To me this is the key <grin>. I suspect relatively smoke and noise free areas with good access to beer are going to serve us the best.
That would be nice.
The one thing I'm deathly afraid of is arranging all this via email, then arriving and finding out there's no one onsite to coordinate anything. Securing a conference facility is great, but I'm not sure we can leave everything up to the staff of the facility. The dates of Apr 23-25 would allow me to arrive early, so at least we'd have that going for us.
Having said that, I really like the options proposed so far. Any of them sound good to me and I think someone familiar with the area should voice an opinion. I think we should set some dates and secure one of those places by then - I'd say by January 3rd we should make that decision. By Jan 10th we should actually have reservations. I realize Christmas is in between, but I think we're all still reading email. Between Jan 3rd and Jan 10th we should put out a plan on wine-devel to make sure we're not overlooking something.
I don't think the University is going to come through. I wish it would happen because that sounds like the perfect setting, however I think one last chance at contacting them is all we should try.
Are we sure those other two venues have Internet access that can handle all of us?
Why does WRS suggest Nuertingen over Wernau?
-Brian