DrupalCampNYC Meetup Notes - 2011-07-21

==DrupalCampNYC Meetup - 2011-07-21==

VENUE

One possible date is December 18 at Hunter

We'd only have 7:30am-12:30pm for large room

They're looking at $1k for the lobby space - this seems high

If we want Internet (Wireless) it's $500

The Danny Kaye theater is $5k for the half day. Everyone agrees this is very expensive.

So we'd be looking at a total $13k.

NYU Law has availability November 20th and it will run $16k (with food on top required to be booked with their catering)...

John Jay is going to get back to us in a week and a half.... Joe has high hopes about their availability.

Note from Joe on 7/30/11: John Jay confirms that they have Saturday December 10th in their NEW state-of-the-art building that opens up this Fall. The costs will be between $12k-13k. I am working out the precise details on this. Please note that John Jay is offering LARGER lecture hall space at the same approximate price (both venues can accommodate our 500 person target).

Forest has concerns about whether wireless will work in the new venue. We will address this in our final discussions with the venue.

Regardless of which venue is selected, it’s important that we coordinate classroom and ensuring that rooms booked/sized are sufficient to accommodate speakers/attendees (Forest/Robbie).

ACTION ITEM: We need to firm up a venue and dates in the next week or two in an effort to firm up some initial sessions/speakers. This will include a site visit to John Jay, final numbers from them, a final decision, then some down payment to secure the selected venue.

FUNDING

We need to figure out what the money situation is going to be. We have a lot of money on account with the Drupal Association and we really do need to spend it down. Everyone agrees that a $1K carryover is prudent.

Note from Joe 7/30/11: We heard back from Drupalcon Inc: We have a bit over $8,000 in budget. Once we finalize venue, we will need to have a finance meeting with Rich to hammer out our sponsorship needs as well as how much we will need to charge per ticket.

We had discussed leaving $2k-3k on account as prudent reserve. Thus we would have about $5k for Drupalcamp ‘10.

We had discussed a target of $25 per attendee for a $12,500 total, which with the $5k would cover costs for the camp.

Or, we could also try to reach out for new sponsors for this camp and target a $10 price for attendee.

In any event, next steps in Finance is to have a separate meeting with Rich Baldwin, the Finance Coordinator

ROLES

A role discussion ensued. We talked about only bringing important decisions to the whole group when needed, but that the coordinators need to hold their own meetings or make decisions independently given guidance. For instance, nobody needs to bring what food is coming to the camp as long as the guidance of dietary restrictions and quantities are observed. Likewise on things like the camp’s website, which is something that the design coordinator can work out with the content coordinators/collaborators.

The google doc prepared by Joe that memorializes the organizer roster and their roles may be found here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnpDisTb88A9dFZwNS1...

Content Coordinator - Robbie Holmes
Content Collaborators - Forest Mars & Eric Goldhagen

ACTION ITEM: The content coordinators/collaborators need to meet to begin planning for topics/tracks, THEN soliciting speakers.

ACTION ITEM: The camp coordinators (effectively the project managers) met on 7/28/11 to go over their roles and divide up their responsibilities. The concept is to ‘stay in our respective swim lanes’ (quote from Joe B.) for maximum efficiency

Note about Camp Scribe - This will be a shared role by the camp coordinators on an alternating basis

Registration / EventBrite - we'll decide on this later... But this is also part of what COD does.

Note - we need a Venue Coordinator that's a Drupaler and focused on working with the Venue leading up to the event and the day of, just in case there are any issues that come up. (services not working, change of rooms / plan)

Social Coordinator - This is about Booze, not Twitter.

Lippe suggested the Merchandise Coordinator - Which would be someone that runs the merch and coordinates the Sponsor Schwag. Lippe mentioned after the meeting that he is interested in proceed with a t-shirt run and can coordinate funding/sales of same.

Lippe points out that the documentation is hard because it's not rewarding and it's not action oriented. He has a lot of ideas about how this is constructed and how we can encourage it.

ACTION ITEM: By the end of next Thursday’s meeting we need to have the roles filled with volunteers so that leads in various area can start to move things forward and coordinate with Joe/Brian, who have divided up responsibility to facilitate and support the other coordinators (see volunteer roles spreadsheet cited above).

WEB SITES (COD & OA)

Willy has a good doc on the website coordination, we will need to discuss and firm up next Thurs.

In the meantime Willy will try to update the document to reflect our most recent discussions.

We're all in agreement on using COD, and Ezra is going to come to Next Thurs meeting to discuss. Willy has setup a COD sandbox site up at the following URL:

http://drupalcampnyc10.com

Currently the sandbox is hosted with Rackspace, but hopefully on Sunday or Monday it will be moved to the Acquia Dev cloud and Git. Robots.txt has been set to deny all search engines.

This site is just inteded as a sandbox where we can explore using COD and do some demos for the site.

ACTION ITEM: Forest commits to collaborate with Mark Reilly on the Camp website so that we can get something up prior to Drupalcon London, even if only a placeholder.

The organizing team appears to be agreed on the need for an online tool. Willy has committed to getting OA site online and helping to manage/coordinate the OA effort (with a focus on a the broader organization need to the community as a complement to D.O.. Willy to try and get the OA site online by Sunday or Monday and to circulate admin roles to Joe/Brian. For now it would just be a non-public password protected sandbox site located at:

http://team.drupalcampsnyc.com

ACTION ITEM: We need to get the OA site up asap in order to centralize minutes and organization.

Let's talk about Infrastructure/hosting at a later date. Agreed that anything used initially is an interim solution, and will be evaluated prior to production launch.

TEMPLATES AND GENERAL NOTES

This discussion was tabled for next meeting, to be held on August 4th.

Lippe will take on responsibility of sunset process for DCNYC10 (similar to this sunset doc for DCNYC9). Willy will try to help with this leading up to and after the camp.

Thomas pointed out that if we're accepting responsibility for doing these roles, then we're also accepting responsibility for documenting these things.

Note agreed to by everyone - don't feed the trolls. Discussions on the list need to be constructive. If they're not constructive then they shouldn't be encouraged and we should be careful how they are addressed.

Willy / Lippe pointed out that having some work breakdown structure is a good idea so the full committee doesn't need to meet every time. Brian, Willy and Joe met about this on 7/28 and agreed that sub-committee meetings is going to work very well for this camp and will support the notion of ‘keeping us all in our swim lanes.’

TIMELINES & MILESTONES

We did not have time to progress on the time lines document. Willy put together an initial draft that is online here. This is to be refined over the next few weeks once we have finalized venue and camp date.

SESSIONS

We did not have time to discuss sessions, but at the next meeting me should agree on an approach to sessions so that the leaders on that can reach out to potential speakers. It would be good to try and secure 3-4 good speakers for the event. It would be ideal if we could arrange to have Dries, Moshe, Karen or some other high profile community member attend. Depending on the venue selected and what hotel’s are nearby, Willy can likely donate hotel accommodations on Friday/Saturday night for 2-3 speakers if they agree to attend.

ACTION ITEM: It would be good to address this at the next meeting so that 2-3 key sessions can be promoted by DrupalCon London.

The above also dovetails with the Keynote, which is an important element. If we would encourage Dries to attend/deliver this it would be great.

We had discussed the prospect of some client focused sessions (in keeping with the theme of the DrupalCon NYC Bid), and should likely coordinate a local team to deliver 1-2 sessions along those lines.

NEXT MEETING AUGUST 4th at NorthPoint:
EVENT INFO http://groups.drupal.org/node/165004