Summit 2013/selection process

Planning began with the Global Conferences Committee in August of 2011

Initial budget (please note, this budget only represents OWASP's costs and does not factor in ticket sales) was reviewed by the OWASP Board at an in-person meeting at AppSec USA on September 20th 2011. More details on the event budget can be found here. This was used to set realistic boundaries on the summit venue selection process

A call for volunteers to join the core planning team was posted to the OWASP Leaders mailing list on December 12th 2011.

The first planning meeting was held on January 16th (meeting minutes)

Selection Process

An open request for proposals was sent out on January 31st 2012 and the RFP was open until February 29th 2012.

• The RFP took into consideration the venue atmosphere direct costs, food & beverage, Internet connection and Audio/Video
• The RFP assumed 300 attendees and included breakfast, lunch, dinner, lodging, meeting facilities and networking.
• 10 proposals were received
• Summit proposals were collected and a comparison of the financials was created
  • Travel costs were estimated by OWASP's contract travel company Seagle travel using notional attendees based on OWASP membership data
  • The costs in the spreadsheet calculate the estimated TOTAL cost for the event, not OWASP's portion and do not factor in ticket sales.
  • Estimates were inclusive of travel
  • Average cost per attendee for all proposals was $2,530.29 (est)
  • The cheapest was Royal Holloway of London at $1,938.04/attendee (est)
  • The most expensive was the Park Hyatt Aviara at $3,123.54/attendee (est)
  • The Liberty of the Seas option was $2,137.34/attendee (est), $199.30 more expensive per person than the cheapest option.
  • For comparison, the average cost per attendee at the 2011 Summit was $2,269.67

An initial vote to down select the venues to a more manageable level was conducted on March 2nd 2012

A final vote was conducted by the volunteer summit planning team on March 12th 2012

The Global Conferences Committee provided unanimus consent of the planning team selection at it's meeting on March 14th 2012