Funding request: refreshments for Coordination Meeting hackathon / tutorials

[jdswinbank]

Full name

John Swinbank

Purpose

The upcoming Coordination Meeting (wiki, #349) will run Monday through Wednesday, and will be followed by two days in which we hope to run an Astropy tutorial and/or a hackathon. These will be open to SURF staff and will be advertised to the wider Dutch astronomical community. It's impossible to know how many people will turn up: in principle, the venue should gave space for about 60, but given the late notice I expect that participation will be lower than that (I am going to guess 20–30 people total, but that's a guess). We'll have a registration form for the meeting, so numbers will be known in advance.

Given the number of people potentially involved, I think it would be nice (and simpler than trying to set them loose on the streets of Utrecht) if we provided lunch on both days and a borrel on the Thursday evening. Is this something that we can fund from the project budget?

I'd like to get the registration form published early next week and need to include catering arrangements on that, so a speedy response from the Finance Committee would be much appreciated!

Budget

The meeting venue will provide:

• Lunch for €10.43 per person (see Coordination Meeting 2024 #349 (comment) for what this involves)
• Drinks with soft drinks, beer, wine, crisps and nuts for €8 per person

Assuming 30 participants on Thursday and 20 on Friday, that would be a total of €761.50. Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty in the participant numbers; could be more or less, depending.

[jdswinbank]

Decision is we'll only run these sessions on the Friday, so half the price above — call it €400 total.

[kelle]

The finance committee has approved this request

[kelle]

Has this been sorted? Can this be closed?

[jdswinbank]

I've not received an invoice from SURF. I think they decided the refreshments we had were complementary! I'm not sure, though; I'll check with them.

[kelle]

Any update on this?

(I have also had many experiences where invoices are not sent....or sent SO LONG after the event that I was unable to pay them because the fiscal year had ended or the grant had expired.)