Tour of UMass Center at Springfield

On Tuesday, Feb 24, I visited the UMass Center at Springfield and was given a tour by William Dávila, the Director of Operations. We discussed the needs of Hack for Western Mass and walked through the facility looking at relevant spaces. The space is modern with reconfigurable furniture. It appears to me that the facility offers a good match for our needs.

Here is the detail from a map (click to open the full version in a separate tab) that shows the relevant section of the facility. (Most of what is clipped off is the part of the facility dedicated to the Nursing program which has specialized facilities not really relevant to our purposes. Really cool to visit, tho!)

There is a large Learning Commons/UMCS-Lounge area that would work well for a Friday Night reception, as a common area to put snacks and food, and for people to congregate informally during the day.

There is a large plenary space (rm 14) that, with tables removed and additional chairs, can seat up to 170. Note that all of the rooms have cameras and videoconferencing equipment, so we could have overflow into other rooms if we needed more space.

There is a hallway of classrooms (rooms 2, 3, 4, and 5) that each would work well for 1, 2, or even 3 groups to work in (excepting possible room 2, which is a bit smaller). By staying in this hallway, we could keep all of the groups together and adjacent.

There are a number of additional rooms that could be available for other purposes. There is a computer lab (room 1) that could possibly be used for the Kids Hackathon. There are two fancy conference rooms and a number of smaller breakout rooms, but they're mostly not ideal for our purposes. If we need a place to store materials in advance of, or during the Hackathon, a breakout room or rooms could be made available.

It sounds as though we may have the facility largely to ourselves although we should try to make the arrangements promptly to ensure we lock in the date. There will need to be a commitment to pay for staffing for hours when the facility would not normally be open, which includes both Friday evening (ie, after 5pm) and Sunday. These costs would be simple cost-recovery for a single person to open the facility. For the Friday evening ice-breaker, another possibility might be to use the Federal Building at 1550 Main (see below) which has a large lobby that could be used for a reception and is just across the street. But the Lounge seems preferable to me, so people can see the space where we'll be working.

There is wifi provided by Eduroam and they have a guest account provisioned which can be used by anyone who doesn't already have Eduroam credentials. There is an attached parking garage for Tower Square and we can get parking permits that reduce the daily charge to $5. (We might consider whether we can find a way to sponsor parking so participants don't have to pay).

One piece of good news: We are not required to use a particular catering service, although Hot Table (just below) and Nadim's (down the street) are convenient and have been helpful.

The staff were eager to have us bring the Hackathon to Springfield and were excited about the possibility of helping to cross-brand and publicize the event.