Proposal
We'd like to bid for having the Plone Conference in Liverpool in 2007.
Dates
Autumn 2007
About Liverpool
Liverpool is a port in the north west of England. 2007 is Liverpool's 800th birthday [1] and in 2008 it will be the European Capital of Culture. It is of course, the home of the Beatles.
Connections to Liverpool
Liverpool John Lennon airport has connections all across Europe with budget airline EasyJet [2]. For international flights, Manchester Airport is an excellent hub, providing direct flights to Europe and North America. There is a direct train service from Manchester
Airport to Liverpool that takes about 1 hour.
Hotels
Liverpool has a large range of hotels from £55 to £125 (single person per night) [3]
Venues
There are several venues available, exact configuration will depend upon availability. St George's hall [4] is a beautiful neo-classical building that has undergone a huge refit. This will be used for opening evening events and the key note talks. There are many small rooms in St. Georges for the conference, however it's very busy. The remaining conference will take place here or move to John Moore's University [5] or the Marriott in Liverpool.
All locations have working broadband and wifi.
Conference days
Prior to the conference we will organise two days of boot camp style training. These were very successful in Seattle and we'd aim for three levels of training: basic, intermediate and advanced.
Conference would be 2.5 to 3 days long. Long tutorial days haven't got wild reviews in the past and we feel these aren't necessarily a good thing. We'd rather have more talks, more sprints and more ad hoc birds of a feather meetings.
Organisers
Andy McKay
Andy has been involved in lots of conferences, organising 2 Vancouver Python Conferences and helping out Alan with the first New Orleans conference. Many years ago, he worked for a conference organisation company and has dealt with conference registration in
large (100k people) conferences.
Blue Fountain
Local to Liverpool and has the resources and connections to support a conference.
Jon Stahl
One Northwest - Consultant and Community Liaison
Jon is able to assist Blue Fountain to act as consultant and community liason to the conference. His primary role is to ensure that all the key points are done by Andy and the Blue Fountain team prior to the conference. Jon was one of the organisers of the 2006 conference.
Christopher Johnson
ifPeople - Environmental chair
I would like to make a focus on having a more environmentally friendly conference and Christopher is going to help out by ensuring that we have a more green conference.
Andrew Hatton
Oxfam UK - NGO track chair
Andrew is the key manager at Oxfam UK for the Oxfam Plone services. Andrew would assist in finding and vetting NGO talks to create an excellent NGO track.
Other track chairs will be announced we envisage the following tracks: New to Plone, Developers, Non profit's, Enterprise
Costs
Our target cost for the conference is an average of £150 for an attendee (so early bird would be below that rate, late registrations above that rate) and aim for 400 attendees. Accessibility in terms of price is more important than luxury, we'd like to focus on a
community conference. The venues can hold in order of 450+ people.
Links
1 - http://www.liverpool08.com/OurCommunities/Heritage/Liverpools800thBirthday/
2 - http://easyjet.com/en/book/index.asp
3 - (we checked these numbers as advertised Autumn 2007)
Campanile, http://tinyurl.com/245r2w, 2 stars, £52.00
Feathers Hotel, http://www.feathers.uk.com/feathers/, 4 stars, £75.00
Malmaison, http://www.e-travelguide.info/malmaisonliverpool/, 3 stars £99.00
Marriott, http://tinyurl.com/2ht2nv, 4 stars, £125.00
4 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George’s_Hall,_Liverpool
5 - http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/