Minutes of March 24th Meeting:

Attendees: Brandon, Sarah Sharp, Sarah Wright, Nivedita, Sri, Randy Dunlap, James Bottomley, Jennifer Eaton

Agenda:

• Any website questions/comments/suggestions/items
• Close final schedule (dates for CFP etc)
• Close on Keynote speakers
• Program Committee: - what do you need? Dependencies for CFP?
• Close on Registration details form?
• Close on Submission process
• Feedback on LPC Planning wiki (did not cover)
• Events/Sponsorship update? (did not cover)

Pending Actions:

• Please review the LPC Website (URL below in my sig)
• Please review the schedule http://plumbers.linuxplumbersconf.org/doku.php?id=schedule_overview
• Post any suggestions/questions earlier to list if possible so we get time to look over before call…

Any website questions/suggestions/items:

• IE6 - doesn't quite render well in IE6. 8 year old browser technology,the logo is at hte top of the page, and the tagging is at the bottom of hte page. Concern that we don't want to waste Brandon's time. It might not be worth the time to fix it.

• registration - (sorry, was distracted here) still needs to be complete. Brandon mentioned that linuxconf has already started registration and we will need to quickly follow suit. At the very least we need to announce our website.

• Refunds - Nivedita mentioned that refunds will be very difficult. What is our plan for giving refunds? We are planning on giving full refunds to registered speakers. We will need to put in some verbage that speakers will get a refund. We still need to talk with Angela about it. James mentioned that we ate the refunds in the budget last year. Bottom line is that speakers should and will get full refunds.

Close on final schedule

• April 15 will be our call for proposal. The date should be okay. We should have the date in order to force the program committee to get its act together. Nivedita thinks we should have the website ready to take submissions by April 15. We should also keep in mind that a lot of people will procrastinate towards the end.

• Nivedita thought maybe we could use a mailing list to submit papers, Brandon thinks that we can have the software in place. The software in question being the same was as the open source bridge conference in Portland. Source:http://opensourcebridge.org/events/2009/proposals/

• Brandon definitely will have something in place by April 15th. He wants to avoid doing them by hand.

• We have about 3 - 4 weeks before April 15th so it would be good to get some status on where we are in 10 days. [added to actions] If necessary we will push the submission announcement further out.

• June 30th is the early bird, should we inform speakers early so they get a chance to register early or should we push out the early bird deadline? James proposes we push forward the 30th, to July 15th, we push early register to July 31st We could push abstract deadline to June 15. June 15 propsoal deadline. July 15, we inform authors, then July 31 we close early registration, and the price gets bumped to $325.

• Notes: We are selecting proposal in the June/July time frame.

Close on registration form

• Travel issues - What we should be on the registraton form and the propsoal form whether they need travel. Last year, we did travel only for speakers. But we can't promise anything at all. The process for travel is an iterative process of going to linux foundation and possibly the employers of speakers.

• Conference program announcement is August 1 (which is a saturday) and should be moved. Sarah, said since it's a saturday we should move a to August 5. If we can try to do it earlier, then we should try.

Keynote speaker

• Keith Packard is the most popular candidate and of course local.
• Barbara attending is a low probability.
• Sri will continue to try to get Vivek Kundra, we can make any accomendation if in some unlikely event we are able to get Barbara or Vivek.
• Linus - we will try the usual statecraft tools to get him to talk.

James will try to get him to talk about something he likes. James will try the tutorial angle.

• if there are any other candidates then we should speak up.

Student prices

• student price is about 100 dollars, and the feeling is that this might be too high. Linux symposium was higher for the student prices. Sarah Sharp suggests tier pricing.
• A concern could be that too many students signing up. It would hurt the budget. Overall agreement that with the free passes, and that other conference are competitive we should leave it alone. The thinking is that we want to attract people who really are interested in linux. We are giving away 3 free passes with some qualifiers. Sarah Sharpe suggests that they go through a committee rather than giving it to Bart so that we know they are actually interested in the conference.

• if budget supports it, we could give out free passes to students. (obviously speakers will come first in terms of budgetary items) We should identify students who could be given passes through the hardship request.

• Prices -

• We will be going live with the current prices on the websites.

Actions:

• Brandon to give a status in 10 days regarding the propsoal submission

software.

• Website changes:
  • Actions, change Early bird from June 30th to July 31st.
  • Proposals due June 15th.

• Add travel options to registration and proposal. Need strict verbage.

• Brandon proposes via irc:

” If you are currently on a tight budget due to school or unemployment please contact us at register@linuxplumbersconf.org and we will try to assist on a case by case basis to find a reduced registration fee. We will not be offering travel sponsorships to non-speakers.”

* Important Dates:

• Website gets announced, Wednesday 25, 2009.