General UCCCamp ideals, planning, etc.
Historical Info
- UCCCamp is generally held in late November or early December, after the exam season has ended.
It has been held at the Darling Range Adventure Camp http://www.darlingrangeadventurecamp.com/ more than any other place, due to
- Pretty cheap
- Large pool (pool use costs extra though)
- Good cooking facilities
- Dorm rooms with camp beds
- Large area for LAN
- Campy stuff like bush to roam in, oval, sporting equipment
- Nobody can be buggered finding another place
- Close to Perth, easy to find
- DRAC however is not taking camp bookings anymore, as we found out in 2008. Nobody found out why, so this might change in future if it was due to refurbishment or something similar. That might mean they'll accept us again in future, but it might also be more expensive.
- As of Jan 2009 their site is down, replaced with a generic not found message from their host.
- Since the traditional place is not available, point #7 is really working against us in terms of future UCCCamps. Finding a similar type of setup would be good, some suggestions:
- The Department of Sport and Recreation has several facilities:
- Woodman Point - Cockburn Road, Munster
- 35 km South from the city
- Ern Halliday - Whitfords Ave, Hilarys
- 20 km North from the city
- Prices for schools are about $20 per head, we will probably get charged more
- Woodman Point - Cockburn Road, Munster
- Camp Leschenaultia is a cheap and cheerful private place
- 45 min from the city, around Mundaring
- Looks about $20 pp per night
Several places in the hills are listed on http://www.ministryblue.com/camps/camp-wa.html
Camp Wattle Grove http://www.campwattlegrove.com.au/index.htm looks like what we want, again there is no indication of prices on the website
- The Department of Sport and Recreation has several facilities:
- Generally people rock up with carloads of switches and stuff from UCC mid-afternoon Friday, spend a while setting up benches, the network, power, and modem/DHCP, then go through to Sunday afternoon.
Planning
- Probably the hardest event type to plan!
- Highly recommend having one person as the go-to guy, entirely responsible for the planning and delegation of roles.
- Set a firm date as early as possible
- Get a booking for the location as early as possible
- Food generally consists of breakfast both days, light lunch one or both days, and dinner Saturday night.
- Friday night dinner has traditionally been a pizza run.
- Matteo's pizza in Kalamunda is expensive but 'boutique'. 8.3 km away. Order early because they struggle with large orders!
- For sweet sweet cheap pizzas, Dominos Forrestfield is the closest at 10.7 km away.
- Saturday night dinner has previously been a barbecue, but vegetarians should be catered for or invited to bring their own food in return for a discount.
- For a "success" we need 15-20 people to show up. Get confirmations and payments early.
See http://camp.ucc.asn.au/ for some info
- $45/50 has been the price for a while, might have to go up now. Food an extra $5 pp, also might have to go up.
Attendee Registration script: http://www.ucc.asn.au/cgi-bin/ucc_camp_register.py
Make sure you receive payment before the camp, when we tried to do it at the camp, more than 10 people who said they were coming bailed at the last minute and we had to cancel.
- Don't include ASCII art of questionable nature on the poster :P
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Setup
- Ascertain who can bring carloads of people/gear/soft drinks/computers up from UCC.
- Some dedicated experts will hopefully setup the network while the average person is more interested in setting up their sweet gaming rig,
- Make sure we have a long (10-20m?) telephone cable to reach the phone outlet, plenty of the heavy-duty extension cords and powerboards.
- Gaffer tape too!
- Desks in a large square shape with network and power in the middle is a pretty safe bet.
- Check what time we have to be out of there by, the place needs to be left pretty clean to avoid being slugged with extra charges. Tables/chairs stacked like they were previously, etc.