DebConf10/ReconfirmationProcess

Note: there is also DebConf10/Registration but that page is old, it was made by people in 2009. However, the people who made that page weren't the ones who offered to handle registration, so it didn't exactly happen that way. This page has been made by the people involved in 2010 but of course there are still deviations from that plan.

Documentation for this year, as well as future years to refer to.

The process

• April 15th
  • Prevent new sponsorship or sponsorship upgrades in Penta (DONE)

• Whenever
  • deprecate rooms@ and move room related things to registration@ (they are tightly related)

• June 10th
  • move Sponsored -> Non-sponsored if not reconfirmed (save penta_ids) (DONE)
  • stop sponsored people expanding their date range / upgrading from debconf-only to debcamp (this may be hard..., )
    • NOT done, disabling only expanding isn't worth it for now.
  • change munin graphs/other calculations to report numbers based on 'reconfirmed' rather than 'attend' flag

• June 30th
  • Disable On-campus room
    • Prevent all people from changing the "Accommodation" field.
    • Say "if you want it changed, mail us."
    • Default is "own accommodation"
  • Disable changing of dates for people with rooms (even to shorter periods)
  • Prominent note: If you need to make changes, contact us by email (near "accom" as well as dates)
  • Stuff can be changed by mailing us, up to July 6th, if we haven't already committed to too much.
  • send out accommodation payment requests to non-sponsored people, if not done yet. Sort through payment details and figure out who else needs to pay before July 6th.

• July 9th (Housing deadline) (deadline for telling Housing numbers of people)
  • Tell housing the number of people per night. (scripting is done)
  • richard doesn't *think* we need room assignments done by this time (although if we only ask for the true number we may have a lot of room changes needed?)
  • Changes after here are on a best-effort basis.

• What about food closing?
  • We'll solve this problem later, once we know if we are doing it by day or per-week.
  • Handle changing of food option similarly to accommodation:
    • Default "not eating with group", and can't change it.

• At DebConf
  • require payment to be made before people get into their rooms, except in special agreed cases (perhaps before they get their conference badge too)
    • Would be nice to have a debconf payment location in Carman or Furnald (venue is a ways away).

Open problems

• Finding people who cancel using Penta and don't mail us (richard can make scripts if past cron jobs don't already exist)
• People who aren't planning on coming, but haven't updated penta, so we hold a room for them but they never show
  • Case one: sponsored people. Hopefully they get the point of reconfirmation (but past experience suggests there'll be some loss in numbers)
  • Case two: people who are not sponsored but haven't paid yet.
• QUESTION: Should we at some point move all non-reconfirmed people to "I will arrange my own accommodations"

Contingency plans

If someone cancels late:

• Remove from room allocation
• Remove talks (if any)
• Remove payments needed (if any)
• If they were sponsored and haven't informed us of their amazing reason for canceling, take action to be agreed (possibly send them a rude message and/or an invoice)

If someone wants to get food/accom late (paid):

• accom, we do what we can, but no guarantees.
• food, we have to figure out.