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Re: [hox] Food - one option sat/sun....



As said, I am unable to take on this task of arranging social events and food on site (including ordering take-away). Please deliver this task to whoever volunteers to do them.

Sorry for being so frank but I have to prioritise various things I'm engaged with at the moment.

Best wishes,
Yuwei

Stefan Merten wrote:
Hi Mark, Yuwei, all!

Yesterday Mark van Harmelen wrote:
Food...

Yes. Important topic. Here are the requirements as I see them:

1. On-site lunch on Saturday

   As Yuwei said I discussed this with Yuwei already. I know she
   doesn't like that but from experience I know that there is no such
   thing like a one-hour-lunch-break if people leave the site. It is
   minimum two hours.

   I witnessed this often enough. At least 15 minutes pass by until
   the last visitor leaves the venue. Until the last one found a place
   to eat another 15 minutes passed by. Then people start to order
   meals which typically is at least another 10 minutes but often
   longer. Let's assume the food needs 30 minutes for being perpared
   in worst case - which is little. Then peope eat another 30 minutes
   and have paid another 15 minutes later. Until they return to the
   venue you can estimate another 20 minutes. That's even more than
   two hours...

   But I also had an idea which seems simple and viable to me. Here is
   my idea. I use Subway as an example but some other vendor with a
   similar offer would of course also work - for instance a pizza.
   However, I figured out that there is a Subway just around the corner
   - I just don't know whether it is open Saturday noon.

   The idea is to have a list of options where visitors can choose from
   - for instance an assortment of typical Subway sandwiches. At 12:00
   we close this list and the respective food maintainer orders the
   result by phone. Of course this has to be pre-arranged with Subway
   but as I know they offer such services.

   At 13:00 someone walks up to Subway and gets and pays all the
   sandwiches with the money people gave during making their choice.
   Then s/he brings them back to the conference venue. Then at 13:30
   everyone who has ordered something gets it, can eat it on-site and
   is ready to start again at 14:30.

   All this needs is a bit of pre-arrangement with Subway and caring
   for the list and collecting money during list maintaining. Also
   cleaning up is next to no effort and no special infrastructure is
   needed because people can eat with their fingers. That sounds easy
   and viable to me - don't you think? After all it's a suggestion.

   Please note: We don't need first class in any way for Saturday
   lunch. If some single people don't feel comfortable with our offer
   they can still find food on their own. However, I think Subway
   would suit most of them and it's important that this applies to the
   bulk of the visitors.

Well, that's in fact the only real requirement I see as far as edible
food is concerned (drinks are another topic...). Anything else is
nice-to-have.

2. Dinner on Saturday

   It would be nive to have a dinner together on Saturday evening. It
   needs to be after 19:00 - say start at 20:00 - but otherwise there
   are little constraints. At the moment we have 40 registrations and
   ~25 speakers. I guess at most 40 persons would use such an offer.

   Probably it is possible to find a restaurant in Manchester with a
   side room for this. Any ideas?

2. Post-conference dinner on Sunday

   For those who want to stay a bit longer after cleaning the site up.
   There is a thread on [spox] about it:

	http://www.oekonux-conference.org/team/speakers/archive/msg00098.html

So questions for discussion please:

   - Do we want to use them for sat or sun lunch

I understand that they would deliver the food to the site. Right?

What would be mandatory is that it is easy to eat their food. We have
probably no infrastructure for this on site. No plates, forks, knives,
spoons...

Also Yuwei says that we need to order at a pre-selected caterer. For
something like Subway I personally would not have a problem because
that is the same as ordering a pizza. But for a real caterer...

   - If so what would the numbers be (or how can we find that out), and

I'd estimate 40-50 meals.

   - How can we assure payment? thanks....

We had a similar situation during the 3rd Oekonux Conference in
Vienna. Then we had the following arrangement: We guaranteed to buy a
certain amount of food (40) but asked for a bit more (60). This way
the risk was shared and this worked very well.

May be such an arrangement would be possible with Oh La La Catering as
well? If this would make Saturday lunch easy I think Oekonux can
guarantee a minimum amount.

How soon do we need to know exact numbers?

I believe that they may have paypal if people wanted to organise payment
individually in advance, or maybe someone could take care of that?

That would be taken care of on Saturday morning as part of the normal
conference bureau business.

I can
interface and find out meal options and prices if we want to go down that
route.

It would be good to have at least an idea.


						Grüße

						Stefan
__________________________________
http://www.oekonux-conference.org/


__________________________________
http://www.oekonux-conference.org/



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