Planning status updates, 2012-05-04

[Martin Dittus]

In lieu of a full meeting.

The next meeting will be on Sat 9 June in MK (details tbd, but likely in a pub after our site visit.)
The next full meeting will be on Monday 11 June in London.


For me this week:

General thoughts
As happened before -- too many things stalled over the weekend because a few key people were not available. This mostly affected the pre-launch. Jasper saved the day, but that can't be our long-term strategy. Pls identify your own bottlenecks, and when you're going away check with others for nearing deadlines, then hand over to someone who's available.

New "Communications" team
http://wiki.emfcamp.org/wiki/Team/Communication
- Jonty is primary contact, I'm secondary; Amran is our roaming "free agent"
- A few more people are interested in the topic; this will become a big team quite soon
- would like to meet with Jonty soon and discuss some fundamentals (e.g. remit)
- SamLR suggests merging Infodesk (and maybe Community) into Communications, which seems sensible
- first project: pre-sales announcement

Pre-sales
- our target was 70 tickets to cover the first month of downpayments
- managed 60 in ~24h (not all payments received yet)
- 52 excluding various "broken"/interrupted ones; 41 bank transfer, 11 gocardless
- i.e., only 20% choose gocardless
- additionally: several interrupted GoCardless sessions
- misc emails asking about CC payments (Jasper knows details)
- atm we have quite a few indicators that we scare people off with obscure payment methods
- sounds like we should also test a CC option (likely with a markup to cover fees)

Sponsors team (on behalf of Alex who is away):
- first sponsor is onboard, need to finalise this
- had a first meeting with the team and advisors, building a sponsorship pack now. Making great progress in a short time.

Age limit discussion
- summary: very unfortunate regulatory situation. Team lacks time, expertise and qualifications to fulfil the legal obligations required. We need help by people with experience who can commit to helping us out
- we now understand the potential parameters much better (lost child post, CRB checks, bar policy, etc) but still can't tell how much of this applies to us
- lots of debate on the list, emailed some people we know, but nobody has yet come forward with the right experience. If that doesn't change it makes it very unlikely that we will manage to make preparations for kids in time.
- my conclusion regarding our decision-making: we're now at a point where we can start relying on the kindness of strangers. I.e., when we encounter team limits: ask the community for help first

We have a new admin mailing list
- purpose: to discuss sensitive matters (personal data, non-public information by partners, sensitive community matters)
- all other planning discussions remain on the public list (this one right here)

"a cross between a tech conference and a music festival"
- identified the most important places; but there are now also several copies on the web that we can't touch
- discussion on the list now

m.