@sridhar_katta , @Krishna , and I are hoping to organize HydFOSS 2.0 towards the end of the year in Hyderabad.
Tentatively, we would like to organize the event on Dec 7 or Dec 14 because any later would be too close to Christmas and the New Year plans and because college students and faculty wont be able to attend in November because of semester exams (I think).
Personally, i wasn’t too keen on the idea but @sridhar_katta pointed out that we don’t have a lot of Tech Conferences in Hyderabad and that we would have to lead the way to bring more conferences to the city. Personally, i would like to have focused sessions on Open Data and Open Science as we have a few people in the Hyd community with the relevant expertise. We might have to organize parallel tracks if we want to do justice to such an event schedule, which brings additional complexity in finding an appropriate venue.
Like HydFOSS 1.0, we will likely invite a number of speakers from Hyderabad/Telangana/Andhra Pradesh to propose talks for the conference but also accept proposals from the community. We will also start privately spreading the word about the conference to solicit feedback, and to potentially work together with other tech communities in the city, if possible.
We were able to fill the venue at T-Hub last year (150+ attendees) before lunch, which went down to 75-ish attendees by the end of the conference. We might get >150 attendees for HydFOSS 2.0, given the number of people whom we have been able to reach over the past year thanks to the Hyd City Chapter monthly meetups. T-Hub is a great venue but we might want to look for bigger spaces - potentially big enough to accommodate 200-250 participants.
Unlike last year, we will strive to organize HydFOSS 2.0 without financial help from FOSS United. Hyd has enough tech organisations that we should be able to raise 50K - 1L rupees in sponsorships from a few organisations. Combined with a minimal entry fee for participants, we should be able to break even. If i remember correctly, we needed 50K+ Rupees from FOSS United for HydFOSS 1.0.
One of the major planned expenses is food for participants. This is good and bad because a number of people who buy tickets wont show up to the event, leading to food wastage. We should partner with the Robinhood Army to ensure that the food does not go to waste this year. In addition, not needing to provide food to participants means that we can sell tickets for partial attendance to the event. But this will only be possible if the venue has a food court nearby that the participants can choose to eat at. Finding such a venue will be tricky. ChennaiFOSS 2.0 was an interesting experiment in this regard.
A major problem last year is the absolutely terrible videography of the event, which led to a total write off. We should find, vet, and invest significantly in videography for HydFOSS 2.0. At least one of the speakers was a first time speaker who requested us to share the video with him multiple times but we could only provide them with a terrible quality video in the end.
Additionally thoughts @sridhar_katta @Krishna ?
(XRef HydFOSS 1.0 thread here)