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How To Plan A Code4LibCon

12 bytes added, 14:49, 8 June 2015
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*** 2006/Corvallis: the campus provided the conference space at a low cost, and this made running the conference much more affordable.
*** 2016/Portland: we held everything in a single hotel and we had to acquire 2x the amount of sponsorship than what appears to be normal.
** '''Prepare a sample / generalized budget'''
*** Remember, your institution is taking the risk of covering any costs not covered by registrations and sponsorships. To this point, I believe the conference has always ended up in the black, but there is always a chance it won't in a given year. Drafting a rough budget before submitting a proposal is critical.
*** Get data from previous years to estimate minimums and maximums, and fill in as much as you can ahead of time.
*** Also, when you get cost estimates, don't forget to include food costs.
*** Wireless: If you are proposing to host the conference on a campus, check with your IT folks about any additional costs. If you are looking at a hotel or other venue, make sure you talk to them about bandwidth and costs.
*** make sure VPN is allowed** '''Consider using a conference planner'''
*** See if your institution has a conference planning services group or something similar - if it does, then I highly recommend using them. They'll handle registration, budgeting, contracts, etc, and really make life easy.
*** Also consider using conference planning services from other entities. In 2013, Chicago used DLF services to handle registration. In 2014, NC used CONCENTRA services for all contract negotiation, fiscal activities, registration, and other conference planning and management services.
* Get approved by the community
* Find a hotel, negotiate and sign a contract with them. [[Sample RFI]]
=== Wireless ===
* make sure VPN is allowed
 
TODO: put actual concurrent connections and bandwidth usage data numbers in a chart here. Note when problems were occurring to give context on whether these numbers were sufficient of insufficient.