openSUSE:Conference venue requirements

The openSUSE Conference oSC is a yearly event, located in Europe, that attracts on the order of 400 people from around the world. The length of the conference is 4 days usually starring on a Friday and ending on a Monday. The conference format is usually structured into 3 tracks that may run in parallel.

Venue requirements

• 5 to 7 rooms
  • 1 Room with a capacity of 300-400 (Keynotes, Talks, Project Meeting)
  • 2 Rooms with a capacity of 60 - 120 (Talks, Workshops)
  • 1-2 Rooms with a capacity of 20 - 40 (Talks, BoFs)
  • 1 Room (Press or Speaker ready room) (optional)
  • 1 room for the organization which can be locked. To keep stuff etc.
• Foyer or other central location
  • Lounge area, registration, Sponsor booths
• Projectors
  • All rooms used for talks need to have projectors
• Audio
  • All rooms used for talks need to have an audio system
    • Speakers
    • Microphone
    • Connection for computer to audio system

• Internet Connection
• Venue must have high speed internet connection (Minimum: 50 Mbit; Standard: 100 Mbit)

  Amount of traffic exchanged during former openSUSE Conferences

  Venue	Incoming from Internet (GB)	Outgoing to Internet (GB)	Notes
  Nuremberg 1	unkown	unkown	Only very limited network available (Hotel WLAN), which was "not enough".
  Nuremberg 2	~150	~80	Same location as Nuremberg 1, but this time with additional 30 Mbit uplink
  Nuremberg 3	396	155	(Zentrifuge) With sponsored access from the SUSE ISP
  Prague	641	231	We got only rough estimated numbers at the University, as the conference was combined with other events; so the numbers here are extrapolated numbers in the separate building (Masarykova Kolej Building) we used from Monday until Tuesday.
  Thessaloniki	405	163	Main connection was made available via wireless bridge on the roof to the nearby University

• WIFI throughout the conference area including lounge area and booth space. If going with cheap (SOHO) WLAN devices, expect the maximum limit of simultaneous connections to be 20. But as we have up to 250 WLAN clients, who want to use the WLAN connection at the same time, during a day, some more professional WLAN access points are a very good idea (Note: the majority of our users is equipped with a Laptop and a Handy - and for them a major piece of a successful conference is a stable WLAN connection). Using some access points as "Air Monitors" and blocking other pseudo access points trying to provide the same ESSID might be a good idea if the location is open also for others. Roaming between access points is sadly just possible with more expensive equipment. Finding a sponsor is always a good idea.
• Ethernet connections for speakers. A standard 100 Mbit connection is enough, so they can plug in their Laptops and have a more stable connection for some live demos.
• Ethernet connections for the Video team in each room which should be equipped with video equipment. The video team has enough own material to equip the room if you can provide an "uplink" (100 Mbit copper) cable connection. Please note that the video team will probably "eat" most of the available bandwidth. So - if the bandwidth is already slow - check with them if some traffic can be reduced, especially during the normal conference hours. Uploading the final Videos is - for example - something which can be done over night.
• Depending on your ISP, you might need at least one machine acting as router and providing:
  • DHCP service
  • DNS name resolution (acting as caching DNS might be enough)
  • transparent proxy (saving bandwidth and - in the worst case - having a log file with URLs your users connected to )

  during the whole conference. So the hardware of this machine should be stable enough (consider a backup server being available). The machine itself does not need to have powerful processors (well, everything >2 CPUs should be enough), but enough RAM (start with 8GB) and disk space (if you run a proxy)

If you want to get a short example overview for a network plan, please have a look at this File:Network planning openSUSE Conference.pdf.

Video Recording

In each room where we record:

• Camera team needs a recording desk seating 2 operators in the rear.
• We loop a video converter box into the presenter's VGA cable, and connect this box to the recording desk with ethernet.
• We need to run an audio XLR cable from the PA system to the recording desk.
• optional second (unattended) camera facing the audience.

An additional room is needed, where we can control live streams, encoding jobs, and uploads. Video encoding server with at least 2 TB free disk space, and as many fast CPUs as possible.

The video network may look like this File:OSC13 Suggested Video Network.pdf.

Location

• City must
  • be located in Europe
  • have reasonable easy access via plane, train, bus from International locations
• Venue must
  • be in close proximity to lodging
  • be easily reached from transportation hub via public transport
  • be in close proximity to restaurants
  • as a plus provide an area for grilling and other cool outdoors stuff