Q&A Stage 2 Bristol

Questions to the LOC from CC

Name

Paul Ramsey

• Q: On the budget I am little surprised to see almost no expense lines outside of the venue and A/V. And the A/V seems quite low given (as noted in the bid) the generally high cost of doing video capture at professional quality over multiple tracks of a conference like this.
• R: Please see the A/V item in the answers section.

• Q: I am please to see the discount registration fee is set above the fixed costs per delegate, but I do not see a student fee? They usually end up less than cost, so must be managed a little during registration (can’t have too many).
• R: Please see the Student Tickets / Late Registration item in the answers section.

• Q: The conference venue fee seems to include lunch, but not any morning/breakfast beverage service?
• R: Please see the Catering item in the answers section.

Alex Leith

I have a few suggestions:

• Q: From our experience, we have about 1/3 registrations in our early bird phase, 1/3 in our mid phase, and 1/3 late. That is also to say, that I strongly recommend three tiers of tickets, early (or super early), regular (early) and late (regular). Essentially, a strong incentive to register early
• R: Please see the Student Tickets / Late Registration item in the answers section.

• Q: We had two types of cheap tickets, "student" and also "community contributor". The first is self-explanatory, the second required a brief justification, but we didn't police it.
• R: Please see the Student Tickets / Late Registration item in the answers section.

• I agree with Paul that AV is important, and can be expensive, and that ensuring that recordings (and hybrid/broadcast) works well may cost extra
• R: Please see the A/V item in the answers section.

• Some expenses are missing, for example, the dinner, the icebreaker, geochicas, b2b, any breakfast events (women in geo, for example).
• R: Please see the Social Events items in the answers section.

• I think the budget needs more work. I would be happy to share our budget and actuals spreadsheets from Auckland, noting that our attendance was only 400, they should be still a good benchmark.
• R: We will provide an updated budget sheet to the conference_dev mailing list today 03/04/26.

Luca Delucchi

Dear Briston LOC, thanks a lot for the proposals, I have few questions mainly related to budget

• Q: Related to A/V you wrote 10000£, but for my experience usually they cost more, what is included in you proposals? All the rooms will be recorded?
• R: Please see the A/V item in the answers section.

• Q: There are no cost for the social events
• R: Please see the Social Events items in the answers section.

• Q: If I understood correctly the lunch price is included in the "Meeting room rental" record, this is including also coffee break at the mid morning/afternoon?
• R: Please see the Catering item in the answers section.

• Q: Do you plan to have conference T-Shirt? if yes there is no cost on the budget
• R: Please see the TShirts item in the answers section.

• Q: Cost for advertising is missing, but usually few thousands of euro are used (participating to conferences, some payed post or other activities)
• R: Please the Marketing item in the answers section.

So the proposal is good, but the budget needs a little more work for my point of view.

Dennis Bauszus

I will provide answers here since some of the questions are in regards to the same items.

• A/V: We have a quote from Bluestone AV a local company specialised on A/V for events. The quote is for £5,432 which includes tax. Bluestone provide 9 cameras, microphones, mac books, and tripods, as well as 3 engineers over the 3 days of the conference. We can hire more engineers if required so we left the budget open to £10,000. We believe that we are able to cover every conference session with the engineers and volunteers. We can stream either to a private YouTube channel, or Zoom. All streams will be recorded to be published later via the OSGeo YouTube channel.

• TShirts: Shirts will be a paid for extra. We are working with Spreadshirt and were able to produce printed shirts for as little as £12. Some delegates may opt for an organic premium shirts to be printed while others are not so keen on a shirt. We added [£720/£960/£1200] for [60/80/100] shirts for sponsors, volunteers, and Travel Grant recipients in the budget.

• Student Tickets / Late Registration: We added student tickets at £180, and late registration at £450. Early bird registration is £250, and the regular registration is £370. We will cap the student tickets at 100, which is 10% of the best capacity [1000]. We distribute the registration for the budget as 10% for Student and Late each, and %40 for Early Bird and Regular each.

• Catering: The venue catering includes three servings of tea and coffee throughout the day, mini pastries on arrival, homemade cookies mid morning, a fresh fruit selection in the afternoon, and two courses chef's choice lunch with fruit juice.

• Social Events: The B2B event will be after the setup of the exhibition space on Tuesday. There will be a drinks reception for which budget [1200/1400/1600] dependent on the attendance scenario. We budget £2000 for the GeoChicas / Women+ in Geospatial event. We budget £2500 for the Icebreaker event. As for the Gala Dinner. We would like this to be a ticketed event [£80] and budget for 15% of the attendance for tickets given to sponsors / travel grant / volunteers. This adds [£7200/£9600/£12000] to the expenses.

• Marketing: We would like to reduce print waste and only plan for digital advertisement. The idea is to have a large screen in the foyer which we can borrow. We added £1000 for digital marketing to the budget.

We have adjusted the budget in regards to the above mentioned items. We apply a multiplier to the expected sponsor revenue for the better and best attendence scenarios. We expect a surplus of [£24413 / £35084 / £45756] and would like to earmark £29450 for the Travel Grant.