Thank you for sharing your preliminary findings, BMH. I must say, you really present a good option as far as cost goes, especially when compared to the cost for other event spaces.

Jason

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Benj. Mako Hill <mako@atdot.cc> wrote:

<quote who="Benj. Mako Hill" date="Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 05:51:07AM -0700">
> I'm going to meet with some people from the UW Conference Organizing
> center. I'm not sure we'll want to work with them, but it is certainly
> an option and they can probably let me know what the options are.

I had a quick conversation with folks at UW conference services about
this. Here is the basic run down.

Generally speaking, departments have some amount of space they can use
and schedule as they wish. I have maybe 10 rooms in my department
(Communication) that I can schedule like this with no cost and no real
need to ask permission. Unfortunately, the biggest of these holds
maybe 100 people so we couldn't host WikiConference USA in the
department.

Our options for space would be:

- Find a larger department with more classroom space at their disposal
  who are willing to "donate" it. I have no idea which departments are
  big enough but the Law School and Business School comes to mind.

- Pay for event space at the HUB. The building is brand new and it's
  really fantastic for events. The largest ballroom for maybe 500-600
  people would cost about $1000 a day. Smaller rooms would be much
  less.  Give the budgets we've been talking about, this might not be
  a bad direction to go.

In terms of housing we could host people in new dorms that have been
built but it would have to be around the school year. Doing it the
week of graduation is a very bad idea. We can look at the 2016
academic calendar to get a sense for how would do this.

Conference services at UW here can do a whole bunch of the organizing
and logistic for us but we could also decide which things we want them
to do and which things we want to do ourselves. They would charge us
something and this would clearly vary based on what we want them
do. We could also organize the entire thing at UW without them. I
thought them that, at the very least, we would handle the program and
most other stuff on-wiki in the normal way. They could be there though
to do nametags and registration, help with AV, or whatever. It's
really up to us.

If we want to get more serious about this, we can try to work with
them to figure out a more serious quote. At the very least, I think
doing it at UW would be doable. Given other commitments, I couldn't
organize all of this, but I could help lend my name and position to
make UW a possibility if others wanted to lead the way here.

Later,
Mako



--
Benjamin Mako Hill
http://mako.cc/

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far
as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto

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