Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

I'm worried by the variables here. It's seems to be an NP-complete problem:

• €y from the budget for sponsorship.
• x people get offered sponsorship.
• k (where k < x) people are willing to share a room.
• m (where m < x) people are travelling from a great distance.

How do we solve this equation? People want to know if they're being sponsored or not: take each case on its merit as we see it (order of request) and stop when the budget is exceeded? However, that may reject people and then we have budget left over. But we still don't know how much the travel will be, so we don't know how many people to approve. Do we just try to minimise m?

Quim: excluding accomodation, can you say what the average travel bill was for each sponsored participant last year? That at least will help hone in on x.

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

@Jaffa: divide et impera! :D

1) Maemo.org had to fix karma issue: this task is completed
2) Maemo council can start approving people, looking who requested it and ordering them with any criteria you want to use (karma, talk proposed ecc....)

The more you wait, the more the flight will cost.

If you or Nokia decide to use an agency to book flight, they'll charge you additonal money and is it possible they cannot book flight with low-cost companies.

So my suggestion is: just approve sponsorship requests and let the approved people to book the flight them selves. You'll save a lot of money to use for other people.

Divide the approvation queue in some trunks so you can shape it as you want.

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

Yeah, but until everyone who has been approved in batch A have booked their flights (and told us how much they cost) we don't know how much of the budget we've spent.

Indeed, the first batch are done, but as we approach the limit of x the chances of blowing the budget increase.

It's like playing a really, really complicated game of Pontoon/Blackjack/21.

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

Roughly roughly and out of my mind... 250€ as safe average for EU, 800€ as safe average for US and around 1000€ as safe average for rest of the world.

Any help fine tuning these values with current prices and cases is welcome.

Going through travel agent is the way to go in any case, as discussed months ago. I'll call the one that worked with Mozilla/Maemo in the Danish weekend. Their commission was fair and they took a lot of lego work booking flights and dealing with small payments. They do Ryanair style flights as well.

We can deal with exceptions for reimbursement, but we can't make it the norm.

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

I can help you with more exact prices, but I need an importan information: when people is expected to arrive and leave?
Is ok to arrive the 8th or is it better to arrive on 7th?
Is it safe to leave on 11th or is it better to leave on 12th?

This also impact on the number of nights a person spend in the hotel.

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

The default scenario is to land on the 8th and depart on the 11th, obviously.

It makes sense to sponsor people for 3 nights. If you want to spend more time, you pay the extra nights.

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

it makes sense.

The only "problem" is that lot of flights leave in the morning, so people would miss the whole last day of summit.

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

Emails sent out?

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

No. There's a web interface for it and I need to go through the council spreadsheet and tick the appropriate boxes (in addition to the bazillion other things on my plate).

Re: Maemo Summit accommodation
 

Well, this is another reason to start approving people and start seeing what are the concrete problems.

The hotel booking is somewhat flexible, I guess. I mean, if they could get us all those rooms I guess there could be also some available for Monday.

Note also that if 40 rooms are just too many we can make a cancellation of the unused rooms if we do it early enough. Yet another reason to start approving people to see really how much budget is left.

I'll definitely contact the travel agent tomorrow. Time to sleep now.