Okay, so I have been hard at work to complete two major tasks here... The website that I briefly demoed at the meetup last week is now at about 90-95% functionality and all but a few sections are themed and styled appropriately. Sponsors being the big element to really finish up.
I plan to have a dev site available by the end of this week for beta testing/QA. This site will be password protected (htaccess) to avoid to much traffic or randoms getting in, and will not be posting the user/password in the group to avoid the same kind of thing.
I'd like to have 10-15 users testing the site, including registering user accounts, filling out profiles, submitting sessions, etc.
If you're interested in helping with testing, please email me (either directly if you have my email already) or through the other various means of communication by which I can be stalked.
I'd also like 1 or 2 people that are good with wording things appropriately... I'm usually pretty good, but sometimes draw a blank or get lazy. So one to two people to help with content editing during/after the beta testing would be great. Also please contact me via email to express your interest in helping in that manner.
Also, I have reached out to a couple of the venues, and at the moment, SNHU is the most promising, and was the most helpful in understanding our needs/goals.
They vetoed the 8th of Oct, as Columbus Day holiday was one of the only ones for the employees between fall semester start and the major holidays. SNHU (like last year) will NOT allow outside food to be brought in (pizza, etc) and requires use of their catering services... Last year it was pretty good, but we had a "very" set number of attendees to estimate how many lunches we need. This year with a free registration, we will not, so I'm haggling over how we handle that.
As of now, I'm focusing on October 1st for the camp, and waiting to get a proposal from the organizer at SNHU on costs. Biggest issue is that they require 50% of the total estimated charges set forth in the proposal within 30 days, so I will likely be footing the bill for it out of pocket and reimbursing myself with real sponsor funds when they present themselves. I hope to keep my donation to strictly the website development and time invested in organization.. I hope to keep my cash! ;)
All in all, this is evolving, and I'm hopeful that we'll have some good developments by the end of this week, including the site, and potentially a confirmed offer on a venue.
