[maemo-community] Organizing Maemo Summit 2009

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Quim Gil wrote:
> Who organizes the Maemo Summit 2009? Is it Nokia with the help of the
> Maemo community or the other way round? This is not a half-full/empty
> discussion:
> 
> In 2008 Nokia organized with the help of the community, I was acting as
> benevolent dictator in most decisions and all the budget and payments
> went through our planning and execution.
> 
> Do you expect just the same this year or would you prefer to have a
> community driven committee (with people from Nokia volunteering but not
> deciding alone) that would agree the sponsorship fund with Nokia and go
> away with the execution?

>From past (common ;) experience, you definitely need a central person
who is the executor. Having a committee making big choices about
allocating budget, preparing the agenda and other issues is great, but
you need one guy who is The Organiser - you did this brilliantly last
year, and also for GUADEC 2006.

I would recommend having the same thing for the Maemo Summit 2009 -
whether that be a Maemo staff person (such as me?) or someone from Nokia
(you?) answering to a group of volunteers making the big decisions, I
think it should be someone with time dedicated to organising.

> In any case I think you care about how much money we spent sponsoring or
> paying food, chairs, and etc since from a Nokia point of view all comes
> from a same intial budget agreed. If we agree on 100€ then someone (not
> Nokia) will need to decide whether 10% or 90% goes to sponsor people.


Indeed - step 1 is deciding on the budget for the event, step 2 is to
figure out how to best use the rest to get as many people as possible to
it. Not saying that step 2 is an afterthought, and certainly some
decisions in step 1 can be taken to maximise the budget available in step 2.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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