Chris (guericotti) brought up a good point several weeks back that I think needs to be addressed: money. Some things are obviously need to be paid for before any relay revenue is collected: t-shirts, spoke cards, advertising, etc. How was this dealt with last year? Did the organizers take money from their own pockets? Is/was there an FM fund?
Since this is an open source collective process, could there be an open source piggy bank? If people want to contribute money to the fund now and have it recorded, they could be paid back after the relay. Or if teams are already formed, could we let them pay for their fees before the day-of?
That gets to my next point: What should the entry fee be per person? I think it was $10 per person last year. Do the dudes from last year remember if this was enough money to cover everything?
Also, start thinking about everything that MIGHT need to be paid for. The more things we consider, the more prepared we'll be and possibly avoid problems later.
take advantage of every
take advantage of every little resource that GaTech offers. Majority of all printing if not all comes from GaTech. Paints/Spraybooth... found at Tech. Bins... found "around" Tech. Then sponsors/connections for shirts with left over resources from previous projects.
Dolla Dolla
Yeah, last year the money was fronted by a handfull of people willing to take the risk. At the end, the $10 was enough to pay everyone back. We kept everything pretty simple to keep costs down. The entry fee of $10 can be used as a goal but if, in the end, things work out differently, it can be adjusted to meet our needs.
Does anyone have any ideas for venues besides 97 Estoria? Even if Dave was willing to host it there, I think its worth it to look around where people might be friendlier.
any of the numerous
art galleries around town. They are all privately owned and don't have the same liability stipulations and so on that freak bar owners out. we know quite a few peeps who run galleries between all of us.
cash rules everything around me
you can ask bike shops and other potential sponsors for cash. that's a pretty common thing to do for alley cats. you can even do a graduated system.. $300 gets you your business logo on the promo material and 5 free entries to the race, $200 gets you your business name on the material and whatever whatever, and so on down the line.
i like the gallery concept.
and there are some places that are open 24hrs anyway.
Jason,I think we need to
Jason,
I think we need to break this down into 3 categories:
Budget
CashFlow
Revenue
Revenue is easy, its just sponsors cash plus entrance fees. $10 for a 24hr race is super low. A century costs $20-30, and that is 4-8hrs. An alleycat is $15 for maybe 2hrs. Just some thoughts. Anyway its way premature to even think about what the fee might be, without an idea of potential sponsor dollars (rachael, christopher chime in here, what might we expect), and the super big nut of OPEX, ie. operating expenses.
Cashflow:
Once we decide (alot of things!) we should just have a pre-race party (any day of the week works) and collect fees then. Hopefully this is at least 2-3 weeks ahead of the race. SOP says day of race registation is +$5.
PS. At prerace party we need to have some T-Shirt designs ready, and we'll select one at the party.
OPEX: (this is not exhaustive, so chime in, skiptown, rachael)
0) Number of participants? Last year is was ~75, this year the number of FM users is higher, so maybe 100+ is reasonable. Lets just say 100, because the math is easier.
1) It aint a race without T-Shirts and spokecards, etc. Say $4-5 to cover this, so thats $500.
2) Most orgs do races to fund themselves, but the only expense I can tell we have is this website. I know the Google Ads gen some cash, and CK has a button for contributions. Other than that I don't know what the deal is, but I suspect CK underwrites the extra costs himself, if there is any cost. CKdake tell us what you need to operate the website for another year, lets just say $600, or $50/mo for now. Furthermore does everybody want to keep the ads, or should we drop them, and fund this website via the race only?
3) Hosting costs. Look if somebody donates their place as a host thats great, but to expect somebody to do that is unrealistic and probably just rude(imnsvho). For the sake of conversation we should plan on paying somebody (anybody???) $500-1000, just cover their direct costs and as a security deposit, etc.
4) Race Promotion - everybody hits the streets, this website, and GT for cheap printing. Lets say $0.
Continued from previous post
ed. For some reason long posts don't display properly.
5) Race Tracking - Cellphone based GPS realtime maps shit is very expensive and pretty fragile. Without going into lots of detail, GPS drains the battery in lt.4hrs, so constant charging is needed, thus lots of electrial outlets are needed, etc. thats PITA. Plus it would be about $150/team, or $30/head for 5 folks. On top of the $2100 running total we already have and with the desire to have a low entrance fee, I don't see it happening. Thus two options, a) last years system is super cheap($5?), b) RFID reader, and near-RT mapping. The RFID system would be ~$100/checkpoint and $2-5/team for a chip. Lets say $400 total.
6) BEER and Food. Its been along since I've bought a keg, so I have no idea what this amount would or should be, so lets just say $500.
7) Prizes - These are donated in-kind or via certificate. Cost $0.
Basically this means we need ~$3000 to put the race on. Without any sponsors and ~100 riders, thats a $30 entrance fee, which is doable, or maybe high for some. Obviously $1000 in sponsor cash means a $20 fee. Not bad.
Feel free to add or substract costs and/or amounts. But the bottomline is we need alot of this nailed down by next week.
Route:
Obviously we need a host first, then some checkpoints. We could run this deal alleycat style and not provide an offical route. Additionally we could borrow from the TdF and have small checkpoint races within the race for time bonuses. Frankly the route should be the least of out concerns.
Final things:
1) CK could you setup a wiki at 24.fm.org/wiki to store this race stuff, etc.
2) We need some badass freakin' T-Shirt designs. Get cracking.
3) We need to assign folks to hitup sponsors.
That seems like a LOT of
That seems like a LOT of money to put on the race. I like the pre-party idea. However, it sounds like the electronic checkpointing is going to be a huge hassle. And expensive. I vote we scrap it in favor of the tried and true. Perhaps if we found some places that were open 24 hours to house our checkpoints then we wouldn't have to worry about police interference like last year. I personally like the idea of of a set route, as a 24-hour race is a test of endurance, not speed and it's not fair if people are traveling different sized laps. But a route and checkpoints will be simple once the staging point is decided upon. I think we should do whatever we can to keep cost down and pass savings on to race entrants. I don't think the average racer will care about fancy electronic checkpoints and real time tracking, we just need something that works.
We have to remember our target audience here.
$30 sounds very steep, as does $3000. If they put it on last year for ~$750 ($10/head*75 people), that seems like a crazy price jump to me.
I agree with Dfunkman on race tracking. Fancy gadgets may be fun, but unnecessary.
Any place, especially a bar or resteraunt, that hosts the event gets crazy publicity and a dedicated customer base. How much have FM folks spent at Estoria this year? Seems like it was a wise investment to me.
As for funding the site via the race, I say that contributing to help the budget is fine, but eliminating Google ads revenue with the idea of always raising the same amount of money from a single annual race may be foolish. Then again, I don't really notice the ads.
Thanks, I know where you and
Thanks, I know where you and David are coming from. I'm not married to any particular plan, I just figured it would be best to comprehensively(?) enumerate the race budget to open up discussion, because we need to nail things down ASAP.
FYI, if we backout a) website, b) tracking and c) hosting cost, then we're back to $10/head @ 100 peeps.
Its a group decision, and I'm sure we'll talk about it tonite.
PS. We need more comments. Speak now or forever hold your peace.
maybe we should consider the
maybe we should consider the RFID technology as a long term investment. Once the system has been setup (i.e. the readers sending info to a remote server) we could use it for every race we ever put on. If we consider this, then the "value" of the RFIDs goes up, maybe making the cost more worth-while.
On a side note, a lot of us would probably fall into the "bike geek" category before we fell into the "bike punk" category, so I think the RFID idea fits us pretty well. From what I've seen/heard of other races, no one is doing anything like electronic staging. This could be a very unique thing to draw kids from other cities.
True
Maybe we should wait and decide this once we figure out what kind of budget we'll be operating under. (i.e. figuring out sponsorship and pre-reg party...) It would be awesome but I don't want to run the risk of screwing people over by asking FMers to lay out insane sums of money that they may not get reimbursed for. Plus there's the issue of ownership to deal with. And we could consider renting the stuff out once we get it. But then we need to figure out where that $$ would go too. Come to the meeting tonight and let's try to hash some of this crap out.
Jason, are you familar with
Jason,
are you familar with ChampionChip or DAG Timing? These are used in running, cycling, you name it.
A ChampionChip, ie. RFID tag, costs $25 in that system.
The real gotcha with electronics is that you must create rules to handle their potential failure. eg. the ChampionChip is usually tied to your shoe and read by a special floor mat. Well some dumbass did a cartwheel over the finishline and then bitched because the system says he never completed the race.
Lots of rules == PITA, imnsvho.
Alot of races have 5 and 6 figure budgets, so while 3k may seem a surprise, we are really going the economy route.
OT: In the greatest race on this earth, ie the Dakar Rally, they specifically have stages that ban the use of GPS/electronics.
Yeah
If we go electronic, we probably need some sort of analog system for redundency. And we'll need a staff ready to handle technical snafus as the arise on race day. Makes it very compicated.
However, the difference between our race and most races is that many other races hve sponsored racing teams and other independentantly wealthy types. (i.e. squids.) 3 grand is a lot for anything if you're a member of the lower middle-class or below. I think we should try to keep this as close in budget to a traditional alleycat as we can. If we wind up with extra money through sponsorship and pre-registration, then we can talk about all this high-dollar stuff.
I say if the electronics fail
We just shoot the sonabitch that broke our toys
If we really do have ~100
If we really do have ~100 people and it really is only ~$400, then that's only $4 a head, which I think is a reasonable outlay/increase. Still, issues of ownership, etc.
The website does _not_ need
The website does _not_ need to be funded by the race. I feel pretty strongly that noone should end the race having spent any more than their entrace fee which should get them a sweet t-shirt and a lot of fun and a lot of beer. Noone should finish the event with more cash than they started with, and any extras should be spent on things like more beer at the race. As long as people continue to click on ads and donate every now and then, the burden of the website isn't that bad for me. I'll certainly take some amount of leftover $$ but paying for the website should not be factored into the financial planning of anything.
Ok, cool.
Ok, cool.
Here's my proposal for RFID
Here's my proposal for RFID reader boxes:
1) Power
These boxes have USB ports and plug into a PC. Thus to power a checkpoint we need some power at the spot.
I was thinking we would use laptops from amongst us, inside of some of our cars. We'd place the reader next to a window, the detection field is 4-6 inches, plug it into the laptop, which is plugged into the car.
My electricity skills are rusty, but somebody with a laptop/meter could calc how long this system would run. Hopefully gt. 24hrs!
PS. If anybody has a Hybrid, that would power the system for a month.
2) Connectivity
Also, amongst ourselves we should be able to come up with 4-5 phones/pccards to plug into the laptops.
This is simple data collection, not a broadband application so even GPRS or lower will work. Warning, don't volunteer your equipment if you pay for data by the KB or anything similar, this is far flat fee users.
With this type of system we could still do a map display, and just interpolate the rates of change between checkpoints.
Its low cost, and should be good enough.