Venue

[forkinthecode]

Can we have suggestions for venues.

Requirements:
area to seat 200 for presentation
smaller areas for workshops & small presentations
please add to the requirements list

[equivalentideas]

I do think 200 is pretty ambitious. I'm not sure about venue size, so it's hard to know if that bumps us into another class of venue.

I've been to an ACOSS event in the Club Room at the NSWTF which seemed pretty big but is apparently capacity 130

http://www.conferencecentre.nswtf.org.au/rooms/topics/2258.html

I would personally like to aim for something smaller, because the smaller a project the more likely it is to succeed/never having put on an event, I'm a bit daunted by the challenge of managing 200 people.

But, I really don't know what it involves so maybe I'm overestimating the challenge.

[equivalentideas]

Miška just suggested running quick thing to see how many people want to come to the event and then plan the venue size based on that. Sounds interesting.

[forkinthecode]

I was hoping this would be a lot bigger than our own small circle - for very good reasons- because the general public deserves to be made aware of open data/FOI projects and how they can benefit from and be involved with them. I guess this is one reason why I think that the more projects are involved in the planning stages the better.

I was hoping to get some media and/or have the time to recruit a wider audience among the general public. I think it is important to get other people on board to help us organise this. It has not been my choice not to include other people in the planning of this event. So from my perspective it won't be all on our shoulders but I'd really like to hear what other project leaders have to say.

I would not expect that if I ran a poll I'd get much of a response without media and first getting a bit of support. Considering we've so far had one single meeting with the 3 of us present and no one else has yet been allowed to contribute to the planning I think that it is not the right time to try to gauge prospective numbers. Personally I'd want to be further down the track and hear what other project leaders have to say.

If the other project leaders agree with you that 200 is too many then I'm happy to go with the flow.

[equivalentideas]

Definitely good call about putting off any poll type things. Didn't mean to do that too soon.

That sounds good re numbers, I just have no idea of the organising challenge. I think this is stuff that needs to be worked out in a meeting. We should make an agenda.

[forkinthecode]

Hi Luke, Perhaps the whole number issue won't be such a problem if we take a different logistical approach and arrange one largish room like a scout hall or something that can hold a bunch of people and then have the workshops going on in the same room with the participants broken up into groups rather than have one large and several small rooms.

For example, a room this size http://www.abc.net.au/abcresourcehire/venue/ultimo_rehearsal_rooms.html might do for everything if we just rearrange chairs as suits what is going on?

If we end up going with something smaller here's some ideas https://www.uts.edu.au/partners-and-community/venues-and-facilities/our-venues/uts-short-course-venue
http://smsa.org.au/venue-hire/meeting-rooms/ http://sydney.edu.au/law/facilities/lounge.shtml http://sydney.edu.au/law/facilities/foyer.shtml

Perhaps if we organise a room large enough to give us the flexibility to go either way then the final numbers won't be such an issue?

[forkinthecode]

Also to help with logistics would it be a good idea to get participants to nominate on booking which projects they might consider volunteering for/which workshops they want to attend so that we can then format the day around this? Perhaps we could use Eventbrite or Meetup?

Actually this would also be a really good opportunity to find out if there is an issue out there that people want taken up as an open data project. That way people can find other people interested in new projects.

[forkinthecode]

Potential participant groups:
journalism students, bloggers/citizen journalist types
programmers
activists/concerned citizens/APS
people wanting help with FOI