[TYPO3-t3dd] T3DD Sold out

[Thomas Hempel]

Hi Steffen,

first off all I want to make clear that the event committee is not 
organizing the events. The decisions about the size of an event, the 
location etc. etc. is made by the Organization Team. In the case of 
T3DD12 it's Sebastian Böttger and Patrick Lobacher.
The Event Committee can steer, make suggestions and as we are an 
"official" gremium, we can of course veto certain things. But that's it, 
we don't want to take over the responsibility for the event organization.

Anyways. Gina already explained, that the size of the Developer Days 
does not scale easily. I'm not gonna go through all the arguments again, 
but because you asked.

The major difference between Workshops and Talks is that in a workshop 
we have tutors and in talks we have speakers. There is a reason why 
school classes are not bigger than 30 people. The tutor is supposed to 
work *with* the people. In comparison, a speaker "only" tells his 
presentation. The number of people in the audience is not relevant as 
long as anybody can hear you.

There might be enough material for 300 people. I'm pretty sure we could 
bring up enough material for 600 people as well. But that is not the point.

Do you want to have 10 or even 20 parallel tracks just to get more 
people in there? You have to have the rooms, you have to organize the 
catering, you have to provide hotel rooms etc. etc.

For example, we could have done it bigger in Elmshorn but we just did 
not enough hotel rooms for the people. This might not be the case in 
Munich but this time the hotels are pretty far away. So there probably 
is a shuttle service in place (ATTENTION! This is only *my* guess. I'm 
not in the orga team. I don't know!).

What sort of shuttle service do you want to have for 600 people? Please 
remember that the DD is mostly financed by sponsors and that it is not 
an event that is not supposed to gain money for the Association. So, 
more people simply means that the event needs more money to pay for all 
the "small things" nobody thinks about.

Gina explained it very nicely. It's not about the size of the event. 
Actually it's the other way around. We want to keep up a certain spirit. 
And if that is sustained by limiting the number of participants, I'm 
fine with it. That does not mean that we don't want the event to grow. 
We just don't see a good way to do make it work in a bigger scale.

We're open to any suggestions though. We already tried certain things 
like having a talk track *and* workshops. Wasn't received very well. We 
tried to get more people in there. AFAIK there will be a barcamp style 
open track this year.
We even discussed some more radical changes like canceling events or 
merging them.

So if you have any concrete suggestions about this, I'm would love to 
discuss them with you. :-)


Thanks for your input and best wishes,
Thomas



P.S.: On a personal note. I really wonder why we go through this every 
single year. ;-) I mean everybody knows the tickets are limited. 
Everybody is so eager to go to the event and asks over and over when 
registration starts. But than, when the sale starts, people seems to 
forget that they actually have to buy the tickets.
I admit, that this year was extremely fast sold out but nevertheless the 
registration ran 11 days until all tickets where gone.