First, Thomas Reiss is OK to take care of those things with Guillaume. There is no need to take care of evening events. So we remove the dinner event from the main conference stuff, and hope that we get a sponsor (EnterpriseDB or someone like that) to pick that up if needed. And if not, we'll just put up something informal, like “here are good places to gather”.
As for lunch, we don't have to commit at this time for how much we need, but we certainly need a rough figure to present to potential caterers. We expect 90-95% of them would be interested in lunch on premises, but we'll assume 100% right now. We will know this much better when we get closer to the conference and start seeing registrations. If caterers need an upper bound, we strongly doubt we'd hit more than 250-300. It would be better to have the same company for lunch and coffe break because we can probably get better prices and easier dealings like that.
For coffee breaks, I think one break in the morning and one in the afternoon would be good. Some cakes and sugary things are probably good to keep people awake.
For hotel, we're looking for is to get a group rate. So basically we negotiate saying “we have a conference that comes with a couple of hundred people. What rate can you give us?”. We do *not* want to reserve rooms. Just get a rate that people can quote. Hotels should be, Preferrably, either walking distance or more likely reasonably close to a metro station on the same line. Jean Christophe Arnu offers to help Guillaume Lelarge and Thomas Reiss when he would be in Paris (week of april 1st).
As a reference, pgcon charges USD 195 which is about 150 euros but we don't need to charge them much. As another example, french AFUP -french PHP users non profit- ask 100 euros for one day. We will also have student discounts (only free for Paristech students and teachers) and such, but we need to start with a base price. It's really hard to guess a price without any information about the caterers price. 100 for one day assuming it's 25 euros per lunch, and 50 euros for the conference, two days. But others think that if we're shelling out €50 for food+coffee, I think we need to start thinking at least in terms of €100 for the conference.
But, it will much easier to figure out how much to charge people if we can get a price from the caterers first.
Cédric Villemain concludes this on three points we all agreed on: 1/ we need to charge people to be sure they come. 2/ we can not charge too much 'poor' people (even if all student are not poor) 3/ more sponsor, less price
Damien Clochard was still not there when we began to talk about this. Anyways, we know design and authentication are nearly done. But there's still nothing to see right now and it' something really needed to begin the work on the sponsors.
We will have one website. We will then have the registration stuff on www.postgresql.eu when time comes, as a modified version of the one Magnus Hagander built last year.
Guillaume Smet announced that OpenWide will get a silver sponsorship. So, we have dalibo for gold and OpenWide for silver.
Magnus Hagander reminded us that we did have to pay some insurance in Prato, because the insurance of the university was not valid for our kind of things. And that's the sort of thing that should be done before trying to figure out how much to charge people. Jean-Christophe Arnu and Stéphane Schildknecht will work on this. They also have to send the letter to M. Talel at the university.
We need to figure out ASAP how much that is going to be because we really need to put together a complete firm budget.
We'll probably have one meeting every two weeks to keep them short. Next one will be in three weeks because of Solutions Linux 2009 in Paris.