I want to thank Mayank Chadha, Rachit Gupta, Ani Gupta, Hussain Abbas, Chakrapani R, and others for pricing out event costs in their city. We greatly appreciate the time they put into this effort.
Today, the team met to review the financial feasibility study for Bangalore, Bombay, and Delhi.
And we discussed next steps. Here are the meeting notes:
https://docs.google.com/a/association.drupal.org/document/d/1yI96-wH_Xxc...
Before we talked about the research, Megan introduced Rachel Friesen, the Drupal Association's new Community Events Manager. Once we select a city, Rachel will be point on producing the event for and with the local community. Rachel will attend the January site visit with Megan.
FINANCIAL FEASIBILITY STUDY
You can find the feasibility study for each city here:
https://docs.google.com/a/association.drupal.org/spreadsheets/d/1r8KmSf9...
We discussed pros/challenges for each city. For example:
Bangalore is a tech hub and centrally located. However, the Drupal community is smaller than in other cities and doesn't have the same depth of experience with hosting a Drupal event. Also it might be hard to get around the city due to congestion.
Delhi has a very strong community and much experience organizing Drupal events. However, those outside of Delhi would have to fly there and that cost and travel time could be a barrier.
Bombay is a popular city with a tech start up scene and strong community with experience organizing strong Drupal events, too. It is close to other local Drupal community groups. However, the Delhi community will need to fly to the event and that could impact attendance numbers.
NEXT STEPS:
- Blog post:
Megan will write a blog post, informing the community about the possibility of a DrupalCon in India and the three cities we are considering. We will ask the community to tell us what they think of the choices and which one is better for them. The purpose of this blog post is to inform and get feedback. It is not a vote. The feedback can guide us in our decision.
Megan will send the blog post to the city leads (those mentioned above) for sign off before publishing it. Once published, she will ask all community leads to push the blog out to their local community so we get as much input from people as possible.
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Event Planner
Ani and Mayank used an event planner to identify venue space and costs. They will pass this contact on to Megan, who will determine which one to use for setting up a site visit in January. -
January Site Visit
Megan and Rachel will travel to India to do a site visit in each of the three cities to get final costs and other data points to make a final decision on where the event will be held in Feb 2016. This is the current trip itinerary.
https://docs.google.com/a/association.drupal.org/spreadsheets/d/1o2bEMD4...
Thanks again to everyone for your help with this process. Getting closer!
Megan Sanicki
Associate Director
Drupal Association