From: "Pat McCarren, Program Director" To: Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan Cc: SIGCOMM 93 Conference Committee In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 29 Sep 1993 15:35:24 -0500 Status: ORr Chris, The items that come immediately to mind; Block hotel space for 2 tutorial days and 3 full conference days, also require a speaker ready room, an email room, and a breakout room. Only block 75 hotel rooms on your peak nights (I reduce our block from 300 to 1 50 this year and we still did not come near the number, I am getting a history from the hotel on our room pick-up). Let the hotel know that there will be alot of vegetarian meals and have the mea ls selected with the hotel in advance as we do with regular lunches. This year we had a very unhappy registrant who felt that she was paying for the same meal as everyone else and that what was served on the first day (steamed vegtables) was not considered a full meal. Let speaker's know that an overhead projecter and screen is only provided by th e conference. If the speaker's presentation requires more AV equipment, then t he speaker will have to pay for this additional AV. Try to select more economical locations; 1. registrants are not loyal to the c onference hotel (this is their right) but how the conference suffers; since our room pick-up didn't pick-up we had to pay $3,250 in meeting room rental for th e week. 2. This year (SF, CA vs Baltimore, MD) last year - our total bill last year was about $25k and this included continential breakfast on two days, and full snack breaks in the afternoon on two days, plus we provided lunches for th e tutorial registrants VS. $29K for this year and we did not have the above ext ras. I would really like to see the conference pu shed up so that the first day of tutorials is on Sunday. I am gathering that alot of people flew in on Saturday to save their company money and then took a tutorial with the money sa ved on airfare. Also if we are going to continue to reimburse tutorial speaker expenses and continue to have two days of tutorials at least we would save the airfare for the speakers on Sunday (and perhaps schedule those speakers that ar e traveling the furthest to speak on Sunday). One item that I would continue is to have student volunteers, Anujan's people this year were very willing and able and did an outstanding job. Speaking of students, we should have a late and early fee. I understand that a lot of the students waited until they got to the conference to register because there was no incentive to register early Speaking of fees, the one day tutorial fees should be raised. If anything else comes to mind I will let you know. Pat