On 23 April 2015 at 14:10, Jeremy Bennett jeremy.bennett@embecosm.com wrote:
On 23/04/15 10:58, Saar Drimer wrote:
if you are planning on attending, registering sooner rather than later
is highly recommended. However, please don't register if you there is a chance you won't make it, as spaces are limited and it would be a terrible shame if some miss out due to the event being booked up, then on the day we end up with empty chairs.
Seeing those empty seats last time after being on the waiting list hoping for a place (which I ended up getting) was kind of sad; about a quarter didn't show up if we judge by the badges left on the table. I suppose that in addition to the above, if you can't make it let Andrew or Jeremy know!
Yes - the empty seats look bad. We always accept 20% more bookings than we have places, so we had 50 booked for a 40-seat room. That includes the speakers, chairman and the "film crew".
I need to get "FIlm Crew" put on a badge for the next meeting :o)
It might not be quite as bad as it looked. 8 of the 50 were the panel and me at the front plus Andrew and Simon were standing filming at the back. Looking at the video stream I think there were either 36 or 42 chairs set out (6 or 7 rows of 6). So if we had every seat in use there would have been 46 or 52 people in the room. I would guess the 40-seat limit is a fire-safety thing. There were empty seats, but not that many, so I think we were close to the 40 limit.
But I might do a count next time we are at Southampton Street and see how many really turn up! And for the next meeting, Andrew's exhortation is important. Really don't book unless you are sure to turn up.
If we get this situation again, I'll ask BCS to email those who have booked a couple of days before the meeting to check they still want their place. Most people are sensible about freeing up their place if they know it is oversubscribed.
We should ask the BCS to do this for May, but even then I'm not sure how effective reminder e-mails are. At the last meeting I also heard it said that the IoT meetup gets massively oversubscribed now, but then a low percentage of those actually turn up.
This is ever the problem when you don't charge. I'm not suggesting we start doing for normal meetings, but this is precisely the reason why we do charge £10/day for OSHCamp and Wuthering Bytes, but then people get far more than this back in lunch, tea/coffee and swag. With £10 or even £5 invested people almost always turn up or at the very least cancel in advance.
Best,
Andrew