<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