CW20 Budget

We were extremely lucky that there were no additional costs for moving the event online - the University of Manchester (UoM) had already provided staff with Education licensed Zoom accounts which allowed for unlimited meeting duration for up to 300 people. There were enough UoM staff members on the CW20 delivery team that we had enough Zoom Host accounts for the main plenary room plus four additional rooms in parallel for the Mini-workshop and demo sessions.

We did reduce the cost of registration from £250 to £50 as there would be no catering or physical venue involved in an online event. The reasons we didn’t make the event free included the staff time that had gone into organising the event, to prevent a large number of no-shows on the day and because there were prizes involved. This caused a significant loss of income but the burden of any costs lost due to the pandemic should not be placed on the registrants.

Costs for things that we had already paid for that would carry over into the virtual event:

• Prizes for Collaborative Ideas and Hack Day

Costs that were able to be deferred to a future date:

• Venue hire
• Catering (including a drinks reception and conference dinner)
• Audio/Visual
• One (out of two) of the hotel block bookings for Institute staff and Fellows

Costs that were lost due to cancelling the in-person event:

• One (out of two) of the hotel block bookings for Institute staff and Fellows
• Reimbursing travel costs of Institute staff and Fellows