[OSGeo-Conf] Paul Ramsey's Questions: Denver FOSS4G2011 Budget

[Eric Wolf]

Paul sent these on Wednesday:

OK, so questions arising from these budgets:

- The fixed costs don't seem fixed. The venue cost, for example varies by
$17,000 between the 600 and 950 scenarios. Similarly the conference dinner
fixed expense varies by $20,000.
- Why does the conference dinner even have a fixed expense?
- Are the venue costs realistic? They seem closer to the prices in Victoria
(mid-sized city) than to the prices we have paid in Sydney and Cape Town
(international destinations).
- I see no expense entries for workshop equipment.
- I would prefer to see pricing that bring the conference-no-workshops cost
down closer to the $400 level.
- AV prices feel slightly high (equal to venue cost?) again, how validated
are these?
- Is "General Service Contractor" the GITA management fee? I'd like to see
the GITA pricing structure in simple black and white: $A flat fee, or $N
flat fee + $M / registrant, or X% of revenue, or whatever, but just show it
clearly.
- Explain the $22,500 email / advertisement / mail lists line please?
- Regarding the previous two lines: if there are budget lines that represent
services provided by or fees levied by GITA, please break them out or
otherwise distinguish them from expenses incurred to third party providers.
- Why is printing a "fixed price" item? (Also, strip it down, it shouldn't
exceed $20,000, even for the 1000 person event). The fixed costs of design
and so on are already handled in the previous Artwork entry. If we're
planning on spending $38,000 on design services, we should stop that.
- Why is the Welcome Reception a fixed cost? It should be variable based on
attendees, no?
- Build in contingency as 5% of expenses, not as a fixed cost.
- Are you certain of 25 exhibitors? Historically FOSS4G has been light on
exhibitors? At $70,000 that is a major revenue line.
- On the flip side, do you think you can improve on $90,000 in sponsorship?
Victoria managed $115,000.
- There should be an attempt to price the workshops to recover their costs
fully (food + space + machine rental + AV support) so that the rest of the
conference is not subsidizing the workshops. $100 is not the correct
workshops price.
- In general the conference should, at 950 attendees be returning a much
higher profit than at 600 attendees, and the fact that it isn't makes my
look askance at the numbers.

Questions about the proposal in general

- The sample timetable devotes a whole morning to "panel discussions" and
less than 1.5 days to presentations. Due to the huge demand for presentation
slots in 2010, it would be better to expand the presentation space.
- Note that with 5 parallel tracks it takes 12 hours (1.5 days) of
presentation blocks to fit 120 talks (this is the amount given in 2007 and
2010). I would not suggest expanding number of tracks (width of program) but
rather would expand hours devoted to presentations (length of program).
Probably at the expense of plenary (closing in particular).

Thanks!

Paul


--
Paul Ramsey
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
I had PostGIS for breakfast, and I feel like a million bucks!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference_dev/attachments/20100527/86531b97/attachment.html