Flock: Behind the Scenes 2

Last week I decided to blog about things from the organization of Flock 2014, so that you can see what’s going on “behind the scenes”. Today, I’ve got another set of things that may be interesting or useful for Flock attendees:

Registration – some of you have noticed that the pre-registration on the conference website is closed and you cannot register for Flock any more. I wasn’t directly involved in spinning off the registration and setting the deadline, but I suppose it’s because of planning. The whole pre-registration is mainly for planning purposes. We needed to know how many people would attend, so that we could plan social events, lunches, t-shirt production. Of course, we have to leave ourselves some time and can’t wait till the beginning of the conference. All the mentioned things are currently planned for 250 ppl. The number of attendees registered has pretty much reached that. Of course, you can attend Flock even though you’re not registered, it’s free and open to attend, but we can’t promise that you’ll get a t-shirt, lunches, and tickets to the party.

Problems with visas – some sponsored attendees reported problems with getting a Schengen visa.  That resulted in rebooking flights which put even more pressure on our limited budget for this year’s Flock. Ruth Suehle started a discussion on the flock-planning mailing list about how to avoid such situations in the future. There have been several suggestions. Examples how other projects have solved it. Some people even suggested that we should not sponsor people fully next time. Frankly, the Fedora Project has been quite generous at his covering both travel costs and accommodation even at the cost of additional rebooking. When we organized the Flock Sponsorship Program for EMEA we set the limit to $200 and told ppl that they could apply if they think the amount would help them. Travel itinerary and lodging options are their business.

Cool Guide to Prague – one of my colleagues pointed me to a very interesting guide to Prague (and not only to Prague, it’s a Europe-wide project). It’s called USE-IT and it offers a map of the city with recommended points of interest, Czech phrases, pieces of advice how to act “like a local”. All put in a fun way. We’d like to give away printed versions at the conference, but you can check it out already now and learn something in advance 😉

In one of the future posts, I will share other tips and sources of useful information with you, so that you can get ready for your trip to Flock.