Meeting Notes 2013 06 13

Thanks to everyone who came or phoned in. It was a very productive meeting.

Task Assignments

Tanya – contact Denver and/or Nottingham organizers to see what they used for their hotel estimates (could you also ask about Gala attendance totals). We’ll adjust the estimates below accordingly.

Percy – contact PSU for availability, size, and cost of using their computer labs for workshops

Garylnn & Percy – writing the verbiage asked for in my previous e-mail

Percy – Contact David Bittner to be an LoC member

Darrell – Contact Aaron Raciot for sponsor ideas, and LoC membership

All – invite others we know who might be interested in being on the LoC. Emphasize that there’s no commitment now, but that we’d like to list them.

Meeting Notes

I’ll start with Tanya’s contribution. She spoke to Desiree at Travel Portland who was quite willing to help (and they don’t even charge! Those hotel taxes go for something, clearly..)

They are happy to help us get estimates for the conference from the various venues in town. With the Convention Center, they’ll often negotiate with the hotel, and use some of the hotel costs to offset the convention center costs. Similarly, if there’s enough hotel demand in the all-in-one venues, then much of the cost of the venue is offset. The situation we don’t want to be in is one of missing our hotel block commitments, so it’s important we get those right.

What Travel Portland needed was an estimate of conference attendees per night in the hotel, and the size and estimated number of rooms in the conference venue.

We discussed the size of the workshops rooms as well, but only concluded that we needed bigger venues than they have had the last couple of conferences.

We came up with this rough outline. (Actual whiteboard image also attached).

One comment, it occurs to me that if we do an invited talks track, that should probably be a bigger room, like 200 people.

It’s worth taking a look at some of the size info for, for example, the Hilton

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday 1	Saturday 2
Morning 1	None	Workshop 1	Workshop 3	Plenary	Sessions	Plenary	Code Sprint	Field Trips
Morning 2	None	Workshop 1	Workshop 3	Sessions	Sessions	Sessions	Code Sprint	Field Trips
	None	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Code Sprint	Field Trips
Afternoon 1	None	Workshop 2	Workshop 4	Sessions	Sessions	Sessions	Code Sprint	Field Trips
Afternoon 2	None	Workshop 2	Workshop 4	Sessions	Sessions	Plenary	Code Sprint	Field Trips
Evening	None	??	Pub	Exhibit Hall	Gala	Other Outing	Pub Outing	NA
Rooms needed	0	5 Labs	5 Labs	9 × 100 people	9 × 100 people	9 × 100 people	~150 people	N/A
Hotel Guest Estimates	200	400	400	750	750	750	120

We also discussed Gala event ideas. The following were mentioned:

• Pub Night
  • Bridgeport (115 person capacity – details)
  • Other venues?

• Gala Night
  • Portland Art Museum
  • OMSI
    • Tanya’s group hired Jetboats to ferry people to an OMSI event

• Other Outing Ideas
  • Timbers Game, schedule permitting 50-300 details
    (The ideal, in my mind, would be the 50 person Budweiser Deck)

• Field Trips
  • Yes, we should do them. More ideas to follow.

Sponsors

In addition to contacting previous sponsors of FOSS4G, GIS in Action, and URISA GIS-Pro, we developed the following list of local companies/orgs:

Private

• Intel
• LizardTech
• David Evans & Assoc
• Sanborne
• Flir (longshot)
• TerraGIS
• iTen Associates
• Calthorpe
• Urban Airship
• Urban Robotics
• Watershed Sciences
• Flight Stats
• Skip’s Company, whatever that was
• Safe Software (FME)
• in Situ (now Boeing)

Gov or non-profit

• Ecotrust
• Metro
• Trimet (propose a sponsorship in exchange for 7-day passes for all attendees)
• City of Portland
• Multnomah County
• State of Oregon (Cy Smith)
• DOGAMI
• National Park Service
• USGS