I will be on holiday in New Zealand from 15th Feb to 14th March and will have limited access to e-mail during that time so here is a summary of the state of preparations:
Call for Papers: issued A handful of proposals are already in. I suggest we look at what we have in mid-March, pick a few must-have papers, and use the titles in a round of reminders to the community to submit more proposals.
Venue: booked
Website: live, with initial content. This is based on Wordpress so we can have as many contributors as we need. Please contact me or heiko.huetter@daasi.de if you want an account. We have the top position on Google for 'ldap conference' and 'ldapcon'
Social media: We have presence on Twitter, Lanyrd, Facebook and Google+ Not sure how best to handle LinkedIn: I posted to the LDAP Experts group, but the post got labelled as a promotion (correct I suppose) so it shows up in a slightly obscure tab. Should we register the conference for a company page?
Budget: Kimball has another conference to run shortly so don't expect much detail until that is done. We have several offers of sponsorship so we need to think about what can be sponsored and how much the contributions should be. Budget items to consider: Catering Conference dinner Contribution to student fund in lieu of venue hire fee Accommodation costs for speakers who cannot claim from their own employer Conference merchandise Printed proceedings??
Conference dinner: The Edinburgh Caves has been suggested: http://unusualvenuesedinburgh.com/venues/the-caves
Andrew