Hackfest: Sponsorship deadline and details

[Eitan Isaacson <eitan monotonous org>]

Hello friends.

The Deadline
============

If you are interested in attending the hackfest[1], and need travel
assistance, please make sure you apply for it[2] by January 12. After
that date the travel committee will reply to everyone who applied, and
people will be able to but tickets and book accommodations. This will
allow people to get reasonable prices before they start climbing.

Conference Registration
=======================

There are three parallel events happening at CSUN:
* Our hackfest (admission is free :)
* Industry exhibition (free for booth volunteers, which is all of us)
* Conference (registration is $450, %50 student discounts)

The GNOME foundation will not directly cover for conference
registration, BUT: With our GNOME booth, which was not cheap at all, we
get 4 complementary conference passes. I wasn't sure until today, how we
should decide who gets them. But with Germán and Stormy's input, I think
we came up with a perfect scheme.

The rationale is this: Our booth will bring GNOME to the AT community,
our attendees with bring AT to the GNOME community.

The four attendees will be a press corps of sorts that will be
responsible for a week long conference-related blogging/tweeting blitz
in the GNOME community. In addition, maybe one could author a GNOME
Journal article about the conference, or dare I say: a special
Accessiblity issue for GNOME Journal? An ideal attendee will already be
an active blogger, and aggregated on Planet GNOME. I know we don't have
a lot of a11y folks on Planet GNOME, this might be an opportunity to get
some folks who already blog about this stuff on to the planet. Also,
participants should be generating tweetage that we could post to the
planet at the end of every day as a digest.

Anyone interested in this? Before I start naming names...

Accommodations
==============

For individuals who are receiving travel assistance, we will hopefully
sponsor 5 nights for shared rooms at the CSUN venue, according to the
conference room block price. The actual booking of the room, and finding
a person to room with is every attendees responsibility. Please use the
participation chart at the bottom of the hackfest wiki page to
coordinate all this.

Cheers,
  Eitan.