LibreOffice Conference 2018 Call for Locations

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This page concerns the Call for Location for our LibreOffice Annual Conference to be held in 2018.

The Call for Location for the 2018 Conference will open on March 22nd.

Background

Once a year, the LibreOffice Community hosts its annual, global community event, the LibreOffice Conference. After a successful Paris event in October 2011, in Berlin in October 2012, in Milano in September 2013, in Bern in September 2014, in Aarhus in September 2015, in Brno in September 2016, the venue for the upcoming year 2017 will be in Rome. To ease the organization, the Board has decided to send the call for location for 2018 earlier and give the opportunity to the 2018 conference organizer to attend the Rome conference this year. Traditionally, the LibreOffice Conference takes place between September and November, with a preference for September.

The deadline for sending in your proposal is June 30, 2017.

After receiving the applications, we will evaluate necessary preconditions, evaluate the validity and give applicants the chance to clarify vague details.

What applicants need to know

Organizing the LibreOffice Conference is a time-consuming task, where several team members are needed. Especially shortly before the Conference, it tends to be a time consuming job, so make sure you can invest the necessary amount of time. Also, dealing with finances and sponsors is mainly the responsibility of the organizers, so ensure you have enough funding before the Conference, and only spend the money that you own.

In the past, we have been receiving applications from several third parties, including casinos or professional event managers. Keep in mind that the LibreOffice Conference is a community event, by the community, for the community. While we appreciate people with professional background, proposals not supported and driven by community members (not necessarily TDF members) are considered not valid.

What your proposal needs to contain

Note: Proposals missing the following information might be considered incomplete. While we try to give every applicant a chance to clarify missing information, there is no guarantee, since we have a very short time frame. In order to enhance the chances of your proposal, please answer as many of the following questions as possible.

The team
- Only proposals that have a fair amount of team members who can spend the appropriate amount of time and are part of the LibreOffice community are considered valid. Based on our experience, at least five team members are required, and those team members need to interact and communicate with the community. Please name all the team members, their role in the community, and their time availability.
- At least one of the team members should be working exclusively on sponsor relations, and on managing invitations for visas as required for many countries. Both of these tasks require a fair amount of time, and are crucial to the organization. Based on our experience, at least a few dozen visa requests, if not more, need to be dealt with, and you need between 10.000 EUR and 20.000 EUR in sponsorship fees. Please let us know if you have at least one team member willing to work on these topics.
The organizing entity
- The Document Foundation itself will not be legally or financially responsible for organizing the event. Although it will support it by any means possible, you need a local entity, may it be a corporation or preferably a non-profit, to take care of money and legal requirements such as insurances and signing contractual obligations. Another important reason for a local entity is the fact that visa invitation letters can usually only be issued by a local entity from within the country. Please give details on the organization, its type and its leadership.
The main venue
- The venue should be easily accessible from other countries, so ideally, an airport and a central train station are nearby. It should also have a good connection to the local public transportation. Please give details on the venue, its location, and its connection to public transportation.
- Ideally, there is one venue. In case you distribute the conference among two venues, they should be reachable by public transportation or foot in no more than 10 minutes. Please let us know in case you plan for more than one venue (except for parties and receptions).
- The main venue should be partially wheelchair-accessible, at least the room where the keynotes will be should fulfill this requirement. Please let us know how accessible is the venue.
- The conference itself is on 3 days, but their is an extra day before the conference dedicated to community meetings, this should be taken into account into the proposal.
- Providing canvas, projectors and rooms for two to five tracks in parallel, for a total of approximately 300 visitors, are required. Please let us know if your venue fulfills these requirements.
- Next to the presentations, there is often the need to have private meetings, so at least two additional rooms for that are required ideally already one day before and one day after the conference. Please let us know if you can provide more meeting rooms.
- Next to the rooms, there should also be an open space for community gatherings. Please let us know if you can provide such a space.
- A publicly accessible, free wireless Internet connection is required. If the venue itself does not provide wifi, an alternative is by using broadband 3G wireless routers. We'd also like to know if there are firewall restrictions in place that prohibit accessing services like SSH, Gerrit, git and others, and whether we can provide a TDF VPN to overcome such limitations. Please let us know by what means you can provide wireless Internet connectivity.
- Having video archives or video live streams is not a must-have, but a nice-to-have. Please let us know if you plan video archives or live streams of the presentations.
- Also, If at least one of the social events will be in wheelchair-accessible location, it is absolutely wonderful.
Accommodations
- Since we expect around 300 visitors, hotel rooms from three to four star hotels are required. Please elaborate on the hotel offerings nearby the venue.
- Offering couch surfing, motels, youth hostels or other means of free to cheap accommodation are a nice-to-have. Please let us know if such means are available at your venue.
One more thing...
- Please describe in your own words why you want to host the next LibreOffice Conference, what motivates you, and what you expect from it.
extras
- Please write anything else that can support your application, like
  - Governmental support or support from other entities, organizations, corporations, user groups
  - In case you already have sponsors, please mention them and their sponsoring
  - Cultural and/or IT related events next to the conference (other events in parallel are no problem, if they do not distract visitors from the LibreOffice Conference)
  - The adoption of free software in your region
  - Parties and receptions that are planned
  - Providing child care would be a nice addition to the application
  - etc..

You may find useful information on the dedicated pad for conferences management.

How to apply

Please send your proposal as plain text e-mail, or HTML e-mail, or as OpenDocument file to info@documentfoundation.org. Please write in the English language only. We will send a confirmation of your application no later than one week after we have received your proposal. In case that you have not heard back from us by then, please let us know.

Again, the deadline is June, 30 2017 24:00 UTC

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN HOSTING THE LIBREOFFICE CONFERENCE!