Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue
From ScotLUG
Contents |
Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue, St Marys Street, Edinburgh
What ?
Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue is a large, modern, custom designed environment providing training facilities for hire to accommodate groups from two to 200. website
There are various rooms of differing capacities available, all with air-con. Each room is networked and can be provided with PCs, projectors, whiteboards etc. The building has wireless internet access.
There is a tea/coffee/juice area. In this area, there are PCs for general use with internet access.
All the facilities are wheelchair accessible.
Where ?
16 St Marys Street. Google Map
Just off the Royal Mile, and within 5mins walk of Waverley Station, and North Bridge (where many buses stop).
Original Venue Proposal Discussion
Why ?
- a professional venue with full facilities makes edlug presentations better and more professional
- a pub can be a bit daunting for lurkers or new members to visit for the first time
- edlug can always decamp to the pub after the presentation
Pro's
- professional venue, projectors, screens, whiteboard
- can invite higher-profile speakers without being embarrassed by the venue...
- four pubs within 100m (count em). Actually, The Waverley pub is next door to the Worlds End, but google doesn't seem to know...
- near to the spiritual home of edlug at the Holyrood Tavern - so can decamp to the Holyrood after presentations once the Holyrood opens again
- tea/coffee/juice available at venue
- wireless and wired internet available
- rooms and facilities are wheelchair accessible
- unlke the Holyrood Tavern, don't need to have a month off for the Edinburgh Festival
Con's
- costs money to rent the room - but Valley Tech will gladly cover this cost for the twelve meetings (ie first year). Happy to split the cost if any other company or individual wants to contribute.
- need to be out of venue at 9pm
- alcoholics will have to hang on for an hour or two to get their fix, or else smuggle their own booze in
Comments
Why is Valley Tech offering to pay for a venue ? - Valley Tech has been working with Open Source Software for over 10 years, and we're always looking for ways to increase the profile of Open Source in general, and specifically to business.
By giving eldug a more professional look and feel, we hope that this will help promote Open Source in Scotland. If the Open Source business pie gets bigger, it gets better for all of us. Note that Valley Tech's primary business service is writing bespoke software for business, not installing or maintaining Open Source infrastructure. Its just that we tend to base our code on LAMP.
We're members of the Open Source Consortium, and are in the midst of setting up the Open Source Scotland website in order to promote the business benefits of Open Source Software to the Scottish business community (with the backing of Scotland IS, the trade body for IT in Scotland).
Disclaimer: we're not involved in any business with the Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue, beyond having met their representatives at business networking events. However, we're based at 44 St Marys Street, so the venue is handy for us...
[PeterG]: I know the venue, we have used it as an exam testing center. It's a really good place.
We're really lucky for Valley Technology to offer to sponsor it's use for EdLug. I'll defintely attend EdLug meetings more frequently if there are talks here and a beer somewhere afterwards. Central location and access to Holyrood Tavern are even better USPs.
I'm very happy to offer Net Resources as a venue for Linux Install Days again, I think it works well for that type of event, but we can start a new Wiki page about that later ;-)
[TomP]: Nice venue, yes, I agree, but I question if it's actually needed. If we have a projector and white wall, would it not be worth considering the more comfortable atmosphere in a function room in a central pub?
