It was a pretty quiet week on the Summit planning front for me, although I know there are many others working VERY hard to pull it together. The Summit Planning Assembly invitations have gone out, responses gathered, flights booked. Should be an amazing event the outcome of which will inform almost everything we do at the Summit.
From my end, we are still searching for space (hotels and venue options) within the EU. Right now, we’ve narrowed our search to Brussels and Dublin. Interesting locations for Mozilla, but options, for a group our size, for this specific week in October, are quite slim. What I’m also learning about Europe in general is that hotels tend to offer much smaller, more quaint, room blocks, vs. the “go big” approach of North America. I should know more middle of this week on what each city can offer so I will keep you all posted.
I am headed to Toronto next week with our event planning partner to visit at our two venue-options for the Toronto Summit (the Fairmont Royal York and the Sheraton). Both look beautiful so again, I will report back. Once we have the venues, in all locations finalized, I will feel much relief and we can start pushing forward.
On numbers: the Mozilla Reps and Community Builders have come up with a list of ~850 volunteers who will be invited to the Mozilla Summit. Because we have about 45 volunteers, who joined the group after the deadline, that we still need to decide upon, we will postpone communication on invitees until May 15th. If you have been invited to the Summit, we will send you an email to let you know. In general, because of cost and immigration-related issues, volunteers will be invited to the Summit location that is closest to their home country. We will hold a lottery for about 10% of invitees who will be able to select their Summit venue. More to come on that this month.
So, that’s my update for this week. Lots to come. As always, you can find me and others in the #summit2013 IRC channel.