FUDCon:India 2011 bidding info

Why Pune?

Red Hat has a large office in Pune with many members from Engineering, L10N, I18N and support services who are Fedora community members and active in various roles. Would help the budget quite a bit since we don't have to fly about 40 Red Hat members from various teams who have proposed talks and hackfests to another city and also on logistics to have FUDCon be hosted in Pune. We have run a FAD in May 2010 and sponsored Fedora community volunteers in India to participate so they are already familiar with the place.

Con:

Bangalore is a more well known IT hub and is more accessible for international contributors flying in. To come to Pune, some of them will have to fly to Mumbai and travel to Pune by taxi which takes about 3 to 4 hours in addition to the flight time. Pune has a airport and catching a flight from Mumbai to Pune is possible if one wishes to save time. It is more expensive than catching a taxi so there is a trade off. Why COEP?

Map of venue

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=coep+pune&hl=en&cid=2150857724025808625


 * Has a history of hosting and supporting Free and open source activities within the college and hosting conferences like DebConf
 * Enthusiastic professors and college administration support
 * COEP won't charge anything to host us and provides wireless access as well for free
 * Has a budding Free software users group within the college run by the student body
 * Spacious auditorium that can host 1000 people and smaller rooms that can host between 150 to 50 people
 * Guest house can host six people (we intend to host the organizing team volunteers here)
 * Bandwidth and wireless access provided by college
 * Since COEP will cancel regular classes, we will have large number of students participating
 * Potential to be the biggest FUDCon in the world in terms of number of talks and people attending!

Local mass transit: Public transportation system is weak but we will arrange vans and taxis.

Experience of the team:  All of the members of the organizing team are long standing Fedora community members and have participated and organized Fedora talks in several FOSS events,  FAD's and Fedora release events. Rahul Sundaram (event owner) has a attended and participated in FUDCon Delhi in 2006 and FUDCon Boston on a couple of occasions and is a member of the Fedora community for the last seven years after joining the project, a couple of months after it was originally announced.