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[Jon Hebb <somebodyrocks AT gmail.com>]

I will just throw this out here.

Coyo brought up the topic of hosting an OpenNIC Conference/Meeting in the US next year and so I wanted to jump back over to this thread to throw this all out there... but realistically, if people wanted to meet up this year or next year, I have enough resources here in Morgantown, WV (USA), that I could provide housing, food, transportation, and meeting space for a small conference for a weekend. I was in private event planning for 2 years and also helped plan & carryout 200-300 person conferences for two non-profit org's before that.

I decided to get back into the tech/IT field this year, but I still have all of those resources

When you think of the USA, you will never think of Morgantown, WV as a destination! We are a 'small' 30,000 person town with an additional 30,000 students at the local university.

There is a local Boy Scout camp with cabins that we could house everyone in for minimal costs. I can also negotiate hotel rooms down to $30-$40/night depending on if you're coming Football (American football obviously) season or not. Hotel would usually provide continental breakfast, my event planners would do a bagged lunch, and we could have dinner catered (at their venue or at ours) by my buddy's restaurant for very minimal cost. I also am friends with the owner of the largest comic book & gaming store in the area and several bar owners. All of them would love to host us for evening activities. Depending on your preference, head to the comic/gaming store for board games, MTG, Warhammer, their PC gaming lounge, or other things.... OR (especially for my aussie friends) head down to the club to get your drink on (for cheap... seriously, we have a night of the week where rail/well drinks are $0.25 from 10pm-1am). If I was hosting a group of you for a 3-day weekend or whatever, I would love to take either a morning or afternoon one day and show you all of the beauty our country & state has to offer. West Virginia is green, mountainous, and has plenty of outdoor activities. Whether it's sight seeing, fishing, hiking, biking, whatever... it doesn't matter to me. I could put this whole conference together for a very very very minimal cost (food, lodging, meeting space, and activities) for probably around $80-$100/person TOPS, but I think if I actually worked on it, I could get that price much lower. The biggest expense would come from travel obviously. You would need to flying into Pittsburgh, PA (KPIT) or Morgantown, WV (KMGW), but we would be able to shuttle y'all here from either airport if you could get there. I know for international destinations, Pittsburgh is a little more expensive than say other places like LAX or JFK. For meeting space, depending on which hotel I speak with, they would probably let us use one of their smaller rooms, but I also have office space that we could use. The datacenter I'm opening will have space available to us to use on a short-term basis... so this would work fine. I have full AV (projection, lights, sound, etc.) for conferences too. Depending on where the datacenter is by year's end, we have been working on a travel fund to bring some of our 'internet friends' here to visit. We could use funds from here to offset the cost of the conference (the registration fee, not the travel).

If there is a serious interest in this, I will start putting together some better costs. We were using the other thread to grab the interest of people and see what they said, but I just wanted to throw this out here. Let's say we're shooting for 2015, but I'd like to here everyone's thoughts (preferably in the other thread).

Also Tim, I'm cool with Australia 2017 haha!

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 7:52 PM, Tim Groeneveld <tim AT timgws.com.au> wrote:

----- Original Message -----
>
>
> Haha, it doesn't have to be in Vegas. We had the idea to throw up a
> little landing page (or collect info here). Would like to see where
> members are located and what area people would prefer.
>
> Julian's visit involves heading to Texas & California currently I
> believe. Tim is just a fan of Vegas. Me, well, I don't care where it
> is. Host it in my backyard and we'll cookout & get drunk for all I
> care.
>

Agreed... I was just saying Vegas :)

I am more throwing the subject out into the world to find out
where you guys would be interested in going :)

Regards,
Tim

PS: Calling it now - 2017 is in Australia XD




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Best Regards,
Jon Hebb

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