NYC party/gathering to coincide with Webchick D7 Tour?

I'm in if it is the Wednesday before. The Muse actually has a pretty cool bar, although it can be expensive. There is a pretty great Irish pub called O'Lunney's that has a great amount of room on 45th street near 6th avenue, not too far from the Muse...

Great idea, Jack!

@jackalope, its probably a good idea for Lullabot to ask them for deal -- The Muse is literally a block away from my office so I can stop off there next week to ask about some deal or other on drinks if it is a happy hour situation. I've had meetups there, they're really pricey and don't know what kind of deals they'd offer, but if we say 30-40 people are coming, who knows...ok, 1st things 1st, maybe somebody who knows Angie can ask if she a) is interested and b) wants to get a lullabot on top of this...else, I'll walk over there as offered.

Wish I could make it :(

St Andrews is right there - they have a couple of different large spaces upstairs. I've never organized any events there, but have been there for a couple of other events. Full disclosure: it's a Scottish pub/restaurant with a great whisky selection and a few imported Scottish beers, so I'm biased. http://www.standrewsnyc.com/contact.html

OK, emailed Lullabot folks again, hopefully we'll hear back soon.

Webchick made the good point that folks might want to eat and stuff in between the training and the party, so perhaps starting at 6pm or 6:30pm would be a better idea. What do folks think?

mcaudy: I think that sign ups will be good so we have an idea of how many people will be attending, but sign ups shouldn't be mandatory. Later today (hopefully once I hear some feedback about time) I'll create an event on which folks can sign up.

Angie said that training attendance is probably 30-40 people, but of course we can expect that lots of folks from the training won't make it to the party, and that lots of folks will make it to the party who aren't at the training.

tom_o_t: St Andrews sounds great to me! Do you think you have time to check in with them about whether we can just all arrive, whether we'd need reservations of some sort, etc? I've never planned such an event at a bar before so I'm not sure how to work it best.

I'm bummed I can't go to this, am going to be a plane that evening. However, sponsoring anything that has to do with Angie would be an honor and it is the least we can do for all of her great work.

@jackalope I can have my company (DPCI) kick in $500 towards drink tickets or appetizers...I can also try to coordinate with @jacine over at Gravitek so we split costs and you guys have an insanely awesome time.

I think one of my colleagues is at the training that day so I can either have him flip the credit card, or probably better off making some kind of arrangement in advance. If Haley can just ping me about the logistics, I'll get this taken care of from my side.

Sounds good to me! Just let me know what I need to do.

Yay, this is coming along quite nicely! Thank you to everyone who's made great suggestions and offered to help or cosponsor. Some points of discussion, ideas, and additional details below.

I've created an actual event for this and featured it, but it knocked off the Drupal Playday which is only days later. I guess we can't sort that by event date, but could one of the group organizers change that so events are listed in order of date, soonest first?

Helping and Sponsoring
A few folks have offered to help (or already helped) with planning and organizing, and we've already got a few cosponsors, yay!

As for helping, I'll post any things we should do up here, and folks should feel free to jump on them or suggest other things. I'm happy to do as much as I can but also have Palante Tech work and clients to attend to. :)

As for sponsoring, I'm strongly believe that anyone who can offer significant time, energy, or in-kind donations should be considered to be sponsors, along with any organization or company that offers a good faith monetary donation of significance to that particular organization, in sliding scale fashion. I'm also inclined to avoid a hierarchy of sponsorship, instead listing all sponsors in either alphabetical order or order that they indicated interest in sponsoring here. So a big shop can make a big contribution and a relatively tiny shop can make a relatively tiny contribution and they're both just sponsors, plain and simple.

Donating Excess Funds to DrupalCamp/DrupalNYC
It's great to have a budget for this event, but I don't think we have anything to spend it on yet! I'm now in touch with Lullabot's contact at the Muse Hotel so we might find something to pay for soon. They've got hors'd oeuvres and open bar menus that seem frighteningly pricey to me, but I suppose they are options as well.

However, if we do wind up with money left over (and I hope we do), I propose that it go to a DrupalNYC community event, preferably the next DrupalCamp. I like that our DrupalCamps are so economically accessible and money from this event could help keep it that way. What do folks think?

Swag (DrupalNYC and otherwise)
Do folks have DrupalNYC swag or info that they could bring to the party? Other shops & organizations should bring their swag, too! (Maybe Jen will bring some Drupal HTML 5 Stickers if she's got them?) I'm only sad that the Palante Tech stickers won't be ready in time!

Been swamped the past few days and am almost ready to drop, so I've not gotten much time to work on this. However I have had some back and forth with Inga Taper, the contact at the Muse Hotel. Here's the latest from her:

The space is reserved for cocktails is semi-private space within Nios Bar. What you looked at the website (seating 30) is Nios Private Dining Room. It is also available that night, but in order to rent that space there is a Food and Beverage minimum spend of $2,000, exclusive of taxes and service charges.
You may pre-order some platters of food for your guests. I've attached our menu or you may order on consumption from bar menu.
As for payment - you may send us credit card authorization forms for the cards to be charged and specify the amount that would go on each card.
Please let me know if you have any questions.

What do folks think we should order? A bunch of platters seems good to me, and I'd include the Vietnamese spring rolls (seems like only possibly vegan option!), a cheese platter, and/or marinated tomatoes (for vegetarians). Otherwise I'm agnostic. No word on when the latest we can get orders in is, but I'll let you know when I hear! Also still working on trying to get us some drink specials. :)

Also, Lullabot is donating two Webchick tour t-shirts to give away. I was hoping to do a raffle to raise money for Drupalcamp but it seems like with just two t-shirts a different kind of contest, probably not fundraising, would be the best way to do it. (I've got an idea for a contest...) HOWEVER if we could get other things to give away, maybe we could do a raffle after all!

Just want to put out there too that I'm starting to reach my capacity (really, really exhausted at the end of this week) so any help with publicizing this (blog! tweets! etc), figuring out what to order, coordinating the ordering process, etc would be MUCH appreciated.

I think Muse is going to be too expensive. I don't know that we can really guarantee we'll spend 2,000 (which is actually more like 2,500) after taxes and gratuities. We're also running low on time so soliciting additional sponsors is not something we can really count on at this point. We'll likely have to guarantee and secure that upfront with credit cards.

I called House of Brews to ask them what they'd be willing to do, since it's only a few blocks away from the venue, and we are all familiar with the venue. They need a good estimate of attendee count, but would be willing to reserve the space (partial upstairs for 30, the whole upstairs for ~80) for us. We can use the sponsorship money to order a bunch of appetizers (which are $5 for happy hour), and they said they'd do drink tickets. They also wont charge us anything for the space itself.

I don't know if folks would prefer to do this instead, but it's another option, just in case.

I just want to clarify – we already have free space reserved at the Nios Bar at the Muse - it's just a "semi-private space" as opposed to a completely separate room.

So that means we don't have to spend ANY money on this at all to do it at the Muse. If we want to spend money we can spend it on hors'd oeuvres or an open bar.

I wrote a few moments ago that it would be too awkward to change location at this late date, but I'm taking it back. House of Brews would let us get much cheaper food, would allow drink tickets, will have a happy hour running and has far cheaper drink options than the Muse Hotel's bar does, will give us a much bigger private space, AND is two blocks down the street from the Muse. It's also an established Drupal NYC space, which means we could tell folks who are new to Drupal NYC to come back there for future events.

So yeah – I'd now suggest we switch to House of Brews. What do folks think? I would of course take care of profuse apologies to Haley at Lullabot and the folks at the Muse if we switched. :)

They're always good to us....

OK - just spoke to Hetty at the 51st St location. She was very, very helpful. Here's the scoop:

• Budget and Payment: We can give HOB our budget up front and they'll work with us to figure out a food & drink plan that works for our budget, our group, and can also remain flexible for on-the-fly changes on Thursday night. Folks can call and supply a credit card number to Hetty ahead of time, but someone would still have to sign for it that night. Checks can be used to pay that night, but would need to be accompanied by a photo ID. It may be possible to call in a set charge ahead of time (e.g. call and say that you're putting X amount towards the event and have that charged right away), I'm not entirely sure though. We'll have to settle up the final tab at the end of the night no matter what, so we'll need to be careful about our budget that night. Sounds like Hetty & co will work with us to help keep us within budget, which is nice.
• Drink tickets: Each drink ticket would cost around $9 and would cover beer, wine, and well drinks. We can give them a # for tickets we'd like to purchase up front, but could always adjust that up or down the night of.
• Food: When we call Hetty back with our budget numbers, we can discuss food options with her. We can give them an idea of what we'd like to spend and what sort of options we need (vegan, vegetarian, etc) and they can set something up with us, which can include both standard menu items and special platters. I think we should order a crudite platter for more vegan/vegetarian options. She also mentioned that we could order a bunch of garden burgers for folks. She's pretty sure that the hummus is vegan; nachos, quesadillas and other options can be made vegetarian.
• Space: They can definitely save part of the upstairs for us, but if we provide a better idea of our total numbers they can reserve more space for us too. However, it's not an entirely private space, so there's both flexibility in terms of our numbers and the likelihood that we'll be sharing with others, especially earlier in the night.
• Start time: We can start at either 6:30pm or 7pm. I'd suggest a 6:30pm start time with the understanding that Webchick & co may arrive closer to 7pm.

Hetty will be at HOB until late tonight and all day tomorrow; she said we can call either time to confirm and go over details. Whoever calls should be ready with good estimates of our total budget, expected attendance, how much we want to spend on drink tickets, how much we want to spend on food, and what kind of food we'd like.

I'm slammed for the rest of the day and won't be able to call back myself, but I think we should go with HOB and that someone else should call either today or tomorrow. Jacine, would you be up for making that call?

Since I've heard no objections I'll go ahead and let the Muse Hotel know that we won't be using their space after all.

SPONSORS: Please confirm that you're definitely down to cosponsor and let us know how much you'd like to contribute, either on this thread or by send me an email or a direct message on Twitter (@jackaponte). That way we'll have a better idea of our total budget.