DebConf15/Bids/Karlskrona/checklist

Local team

Core Local team

• Martin Bagge / brother
  • DD. DebConf10, DebConf11 and DebConf12 visitor and volunteer.
  • not at site, lived in the area for six years and worked at the student union for ten years - good knowledge about the area.
• Otyg
  • At site
• Norrland
  • At site
• Prosten
  • At site
• xkcd
  • At site
• killedkenny
  • At site
• kitty
  • At site

(the list is not complete and not binding for the persons listed until we have done a formal decision)

Things for this section

• Please name the main local team and describe their commitment (i.e. connection, work they have done before, how long...) in organizing events and working in Free Software projects. Are they perhaps even known inside Debian?
• Of these people, which have been present at a previous DebConfs and who have participated as organizers and/or volunteers (the line might be quite blurry at times) of a previous DebConf?
• Are you willing to work on the final report and sponsor bags from DebConf N-1? (This is somewhat satirical, meant to highlight the fact that often the DCN+1 team team finishes these things from DCN even though it technically isn't their job. This item will hopefully also motivate future teams to finish their own report/sponsor bags in a timely manner.)

Choice of city / town / whatever

The proposed location to host DebConf15 is Karlskrona, a naval town in the south east corner of Sweden with about 35000 inhabitants. The accessibility aspect should work all right. Part of the town is rather old and protected by the UN as World Heritage but where possible the law forces public entities to conform to accessiblity guidelines, the main venue by all means is accessible.

People are very used to meet visitors from other countries and cultures and as long as you use English there really should be no problem at all.

Travelling to/from

Traveling to Karlskrona is rather easy, the closest airport is Ronneby (RNB) with daily flights to and from Stockholm, from RNB you can catch the airport bus that takes you to Karlskrona.The encouraged route would however be to go to Copenhagen (CPH) and then switch to train to Karlskrona, the train ride would be about 3 hours but with no switching trainsets. Some Irish lower cost airline is using Småland Airport in Växjö as their home airport in the region, going from that airport to Karlskrona first need a ride to Växjö main station and then you can either go by bus or by train - the bus will take about two hours to Ronneby and then a 15 minutes train ride to Karlskrona. Going by train from Växjö to Karlskrona is a nonstop ride.

For the ferry preferring people there are at least two good options; Gdynia (Poland) - Karlskrona with Stena Line and Świnoujście (Poland) - Ystad. When arriving from Gdynia (without a car) you have to either catch a taxi or take a local bus from the ferry stop. When arriving in Ystad you still have some ground to cover - if you have a car you will drive north and connect to E22 near Kristianstad and from there you follow the road signs. In other cases you can travel with the local trains and buses and try to get to either Lund or Kristanstad and switch to the Øresundståg from Copenhagen/Malmö towards Karlskrona.

For Visa questions the main thing to know is that Sweden is part of the EU and Schengen, the Swedish wikipedia page has a nice list about visas for Sweden (translation: "Krav på visum" => "Require Visa", "Inga krav på visum" => "No visa requirement"). When travelling to Copenhagen you probably need visa for Denmark though, the border crossing between Denmark and Sweden is no hassle by train, no customs at all as you already have arrived in the EU.

Other notes

Smoking inside is strictly prohibited including but not limited to pubs and bars. Smoking outside is not banned but might be restricted in the near future. Also relevant to mention when speaking of drugs. Sweden uses a alcohol monopoly so beer, wine and others is not easily accessible. The government controlled shops (Systembolaget) are open Mondays - Saturdays, the service is on the other hand super!

Sweden is covered by the ATA Carnet system and bringing things in to Sweden and then exporting the same goods out from Sweden is allowed as long as it's done within a year. Exact details need to be grinded out ofc but this should take care of most things.

Buses in the town

There are two busses on schedule between town and campus.

Route 1

• From campus to city
  • m-f: first 5:20, last 23:40
  • sat: first 6:30, last 23:40
  • sun: first 6:30, last 23:10
• From city to campus
  • m-f: first 5:25, last 22:50
  • sat: first 6:35, last 22:50
  • sun: first 6:35, last 22:50

Route 7

• From campus to city
  • m-f: first 5:50, last 22:55
  • sat: first 7:25, last 22:55
  • sun: first 7:25, last 22:25
• From city to campus
  • m-f: first 6:25, last 23:12
  • sat: first 7:05, last 23:05
  • sun: first 7:05, last 23:05

Combined there are one departure every ten minutes in both directions.

Things for this section

• Are you suggesting a city, a town, a village, a spa in the middle of nowhere?
  • How many people live there?
  • How easy/convenient is the proposed place to get all strange and regular kinds of hardware?
    • Electronic/electricity shops
    • Computer stores (A "media market" like end user oriented store doesn't count)
    • Supermarkets, etc.
  • How easy is to handicapped people move there?
• Which is the nearest airport?
  • Are there any cheap airlines flying near the chosen city?
  • How long does the trip from the airport to the venue take?
• How friendly is your country towards foreigners?
  • Visas: Which/how many countries' citizens require getting a visa? How hard (bureaucratic, probable) is it to get it?
    • Are there any import regulations, which might affect DebConf? (e.g. a limit to number of notebooks / DVDs / other media you can bring in; hard regulations for money transfers; etc.)
  • Language: Do most people talk English? How hard is it for a foreigner to find their way around?
  • Smoking: What are the local regulations about smoking?

Conference Facilities

The main veneu for the conference is Blekinge Institue of Technology. The main campus is located at the old Swedish coastal artillery KA2 campus in Karlskrona. Some buildings are rather old but we are focusing on using the newer buildings to guarantee the accessibility aspects. The main building we are targeting were built 2009/2010 (marked J at the top picture here (in Swedish)) and houses lecture rooms of variying sizes (20-300+) in the ground floor. Except the student union building all buildings we plan to use can be accessed without even being outside and going between them using a wheel chair shouldn't be all to difficult.

Plan is to not pay anything for the venue, the bid is endorsed by the university.

The direct vicinity of the campus does not have super good possibilities for food and drinks. Some pizza shops, indian food take away and some thai take away. The main town is about 30-45 minute walk away (use the bus!). Same goes for the hotels/hostels/other. Other than food, drinks and sleeping everything will be at the same place. To make up for the unavailable pubs and food places the plan is to have the student pub open during DebConf and that is ofc at campus, marked K at the picture.

For lectures, hacklabs and workshops we plan to use rooms in hous G, H, J and K. House G is one of the original house from the costal artillery and House K is the student pub (hacklab with beer?), house H might not be available depending on what time we choose for DebConf, house H was built early 2000-something and house J was built 2009-2010.

The lecture rooms are in some cases with seats and tables unmovable and in some other cases they can be moved as seems fit. The super large room is with movable chairs and tables, not possible to divde it to smaller rooms though.

Accessibility wise we need to check on hearing aid but most rooms in the newer building will have built in hearing loop. Visibility help is mandatory around all campus and all signs are available with braille and moving disability is a none issue in all the newer parts. The student union building is probably the exception, access to the building is no problem but bathrooms are at the bottom floor and no lift is available.

Hacklab 24x7 is what we aim for. The student union pub will not be 24x7 for hacklabs because of laws for selling alcohol. If we don't sell anything there it do not need to be closed and emptied ater 3:30am otherwise it must. The buildings are accessible by all with access cards, we need to discuss these things with the superintendent - maybe some exceptions can be arranged. Do not leave things in the hacklabs in general, lecture rooms will be lockable - hacklabs inside regular lecture rooms can be locked ofc.

Blueprints available per request, some at our disposal already - others not. They are publicly available anyhow.

Things for this section

• -How much does it cost to rent these facilities?</strike>
• How far away are the locations from each other? (auditoriums, hacklabs, restaurant, sleeping quarters, info desk)
  • What kind of places are available suitable for hacklabs, workshops, BoFs and talks?
  • How many people fit in each of them?
  • How flexible can that be handled?
    • ~-Can smaller auditoriums be merged into a bigger one?-~
    • Are tables/chairs fixed, or can we arrange them to fit more people/give more room to the people that we need?
  • Is the venue ready for handicapped people? Note: Keep in mind that it's not only motion-handicapped - Is the area safe for people with any kind of handicap? (There are sight and hearing-impaired people, too.) Bonus: What people is it not good for?
    • Access to all areas with ramps and/or elevators? (Note: carrying somebody over some steps is not usually an acceptable option.)
    • Are there people with experience handling handicapped people, who checked that?

• Are blueprints with exact distances available to us (to be kept confidential on request)?
  • Can be arranged, they are publicly available at least and we have some of them already.

• What kind of audio equipment is already present at the auditoriums?
  • Wireless or stationary mics?
  • clip-on kind of mics or cary in your hand mics?
  • How many of them?
• Will the hacklabs be allowed to stay open 24x7? What time schedule do they offer?
• What kind of security will be there?

• Are there any limitations regarding the consumptions of food / alcohol? Where do what limitations apply?
  • How far is it to the nearest convenience stores / all-night restaurants?

• Please provide pictures of the venue/accommodation.

Food

No contacts made. For other events we've used at least three different suppliers for with a couple of hundred people being served. Buffet or plates from about €9-14/person. With a longer contract and delivery twice a day we assume there can be lower prices to get when we play them against each other. (specific orders for vegetarian, vegan or taking care of intolerance against certain things haven't been a problem earlier)

Except having catered food there are at least one restaurant at campus and some smaller take away style shops for pizza, indian food or thai food in the closer area. Other options are located at the city centre.

Things for this section

• How much are the meals per person per day?
• Is the eating place near the talks place / the hacklabs?
• What kind of food would be served?
  • In what fashion? (service to the table, limited buffet, open buffet, etc.)
• Would food for vegetarian / vegan / lactose-intolerant / gluten-sensitive / religious (of any denomination) people be available?
  • How much meals do we need to order to get those kind of "special" meals?
  • Will it cost extra to get those special meals?
• In a two week period, how many more or less equal meals can we expect?

Network connectivity

The main location is hooked to the Swedish University Network and can at maximum capacity give us 10GBps (*2 as it has active backup rings). Part of the buildings we have in mind "only" offers 1 GBps but they compensate for that by selling beer. Wifi coverage is complete if necessary. If we want to build our own wifi as usual it is probably rather easy to get done, even easier if we can decide on number of APs and rooms to cover before - by then we can designate specific wall outlets for a special VLAN. To our knowledge one problem exist, the university blocks incoming port 22 for some stupid reason. MAYBE this can be lifted in some way during DebConf, we don't think it is a big issue as you can just use another port for SSH and depending on the need of SSH access from outside we also can put some machines in a network outside the universitys network. We (related organizations) have IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses assigned but unused as of now. Traffic shaping can be arranged if needed be. Setting up the network even before DebCamp is a non-issue as it's already there.

We will NOT be able to cover the suggested hotels/hostels/etc with the same network as the venue.

Things for this section

• Is the area already wired with regular network infrastructure? (much preferrably: 100Mbps or 1Gbps switched)
• How much does it cost and how difficult is it to get a big internet connection? (10/20 Mbits at least)
• How much work does it imply to cover the area with wireless links?
• If we use someone else's infrastructure, how easy / flexible can that be handled, regarding routing / firewall / ip-range / public access / other stuff?
  • Do we have restrictions on allowed ports?
  • Are we traffic-shaped? Or can we set a traffic shaper if we need so?
• Would it be possible to set up the network before Debcamp? (a day or two, earlier would be nicer, in order to handle problems gracefully. Additional weeks for wireless.)

Special rooms

Either we use some lecture room(s) or the student union offices or some such. This is van for sure be solved.

Things for this section

Both for server and video rooms:

• General conditions for the rooms
  • Size
  • Have they/do they need air conditioning?
  • What electrical load can they handle?

Accomodation

This is our main problem.

There are hotels and hostels araound but most of them are focused on the city center and not really around the campus. The 30-45 minute walk one way might be over the top for most visitors. The bus connection is very good and having someone sponsor bus tickets would be really really awesome.

Looking at the website for one of the larger hotels they use €30 as list price for august 2015 for family sized rooms (2-3 adults).

For hostels we have at least three options and they start at €20 per night.

Things for this section

• How much does it cost per person per night?
• Is the place where people are going to sleep near the conference facilities?
• Is it able to handle a varying number from 200 to 500 people?
• Is it able to handle non-native speaking people? (i.e. do the people at the sleeping facilities speak English?)
• Will there be a need of a "Debconf" info-desk, or would the local (hotel or such) people be able to handle that themselves? (See InfoDesk for details on duties)
• Will it be possible for couples to stay in their own rooms?
• How many room keys would be available?
• Are there other hotels around?
• Are there rooms ready for handicapped people? How many?

Fun and Free time

We haven't really looked at these things at this stage.

Things for this section

• What activities can be done during the free time?
• What would be a possible Day Trip?
  • Is the proposed location ready to receive people with disabilities?
• How expensive would that be?

Local Sponsors

Blekinge Institue of Technology NEED to be part of this and they NEED to offer the venue for free as well as the basic network (VLAN from some socket somewhere as bare minimum). We also want the local triple helix organizations TelecomCity and Netport Karlshamn to be sponsors in some way. There are some interesting comapnies in the region that we want to talk with but nothing is started yet.

Support from Stundetregion Blekinge would be nice, as they usually sponsor events related to BTH students with funds and such.

We do count on some local sponsors from IT realted business in the southern part of Sweden, there are good business networks where we have some or even good connetions to already.

Things for this section

• Do you have a list of prospective sponsors that might be interested in the conference? Money, hardware, connectivity, etc.

Timing

Early June or mid August, Karlskrona is a summer tourist city and July and probably the first week of August is the most intense period for tourists. Also the university general ends regular semester the first weekend in June and the Autumn semester starts the week with the first of September in it. To find accomodation that is not insane in pricing we need to stay away from the absolute top weeks. Also easier for people to travel to and from Karlskrona.

Things for this section

• -When (and why) would be the best time to host DebConf at your location?-
• What is your backup plan if your preferred venue isn't available at that time?