Hi Joost! Thank you for your feedback! It is most certainly welcome. However, you point to a few issues that we know about, but which we can't really do anything about; I thought it might make sense to have a public answer on that, to clarify the situation a bit. On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 02:19:04PM +0100, Joost Ringoot wrote: [...]
Try to get bigger rooms?
We already have all the big rooms (and then some) which the ULB has on the Solbosch campus. Short of constructing new buildings (which actually happened when the K building was brand new for the 2012 edition), there simply is no way we can get bigger rooms. We know this is a problem, and we do try to distribute rooms so that we can avoid overcrowdedness as much as possible; but it's simply not possible to completely fix this problem. [...]
Maybe 2 days is too short, extra weekdays, or extra weekend? I would take a holiday for an extra day of Fosdem.
Unfortunately, the ULB doesn't take the week off for FOSDEM. We can't extend FOSDEM to more than two days, except by going to a conference center or similar (which would be smaller, and which would jeopardize the free nature of the event). As for the extra weekend: organizing one weekend is already very taxing on the team as it is. We are happy to do this, but I doubt we'd survive doing it again for the weekend after :-) [...]
Try to get mivb/stib involved to get a little more public transport between fosdem and stations/city center/large parkings?
MIVB used to have a department that would allow you to book special-purpose buses, which we used in previous years. Unfortunately, this department was closed down recently, and there is no other way for us to get them to increase their capacity. We used couches instead this year to provide a shuttle service. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage.