YAPC::EU::2005-Some Thoughts I

YAPC ended last friday. Yesterday went with some of the atendees to a dinner (Birthday dinner for one of them) and today went with Larry and Gloria Wall to the Airport. So, things are really ending and I just need to clean up the venue and pay all things not paid yet.

Meanwhile, I think it is a good time to evaluate YAPC::EU, or at least, some of its aspects. I'll add some comments, with no special order. It is just what goes in my mind at the moment.

With just two organizers (cog and me) we worked a lot. Given cog has a strict work (I'm doing my PhD, so I have a more flexible schedule) I had most of the work to get things done: tshirts, proceedings, The Perl Review special edition, and so on. I tried to make cog work more in the e-mail and phone contacts, as those can be easily done from work. Magda Joana helped us a lot as well contacting directly hotels and restaurants.

It is true that the less people you have in the organization, the more work they have to do. But in the other hand, you know exactly who is doing what, and, specially, if you really trust your organization partners, you know he will do that.

We had some help during the conference from volunteers. In fact, we can't call them volunteers at all, as we invited them. They was just about 8 full time. It can seem much, but it isn't. If you count three to take care of the cameras in the three rooms, we get 5. From these, 2 were mainly in the registration table issuing receipts. The others were doing what was needed in that moment, specially, taking care of coffee breaks.

As we talk about coffee breaks, is interesting to notice that bakeries have not any idea about how much one person eat. We asked for a proposal for 6 coffee breaks for about 250 people, and they offered 200 croissants. Interesting, huh? Well, we had to pay the remaining 700 croissants, 600 breads with bacon, 450 rice cakes and 450 "pasteis de belém". Oh, we needed to buy water as well as juices. I can't remember how much liters, but trust me, they were a lot.

In the first coffee break all the food gone in... 5 minutes. So, our values were not exagerated. So, we tried to figure out how to get some more food. Good we had a sponsor that paid to get fruit in the coffee breaks. That was fine.