Can you help?

Recently, we lost our normal venue for CamJam – the Institute of Astronomy. This was through no fault of our own – Andy, who was our contact there, has recently changed jobs within the University and moved buildings. Thanks Andy for the years of support you’ve given us!

This does leave us at something of a crossroads. We have a couple of ideas for places to hold the Jam in future, but they’re currently working out as quite expensive. Given that we want to make sure that our Jams are self-funding and self-sustaining, these venues are at the upper limit of what we think we can afford, given past ticket sales.

So, we are reaching out to you, our attendees and interested parties. Do you know of any venue in Cambridge (or even the surrounding villages/towns) that might be suitable to hold CamJam? A school, community centre, town hall, college, University building or other suitable space?

We are open to any ideas you may have. Ideally, it will be somewhere where you, personally, have either a contact or a personal stake – a foot in the door, so to speak. We would like to hold a Jam in September, so we have a month or two to get things sorted. Hopefully, it will be somewhere that has the following facilities:

• Cheap/free parking!
• An area for Show-and-Tell and the Marketplace.
• A room, hall or area where we can set up chairs for talks.
• A room, or preferably multiple rooms, where we can hold 20-person workshops.
• Somewhere to serve food/drink from – a servery, kitchen-with-a-hatch or something like that.
• Somewhere where it’s possible to either park close to the venue or drop things off outside near the venue.
• The ability to hold our regular audience of between 150 and 200 people.
• Good travel links – i.e. not impossible to find!

With any luck, someone out there has an idea of somewhere that is suitable (even if it’s ‘nearly’ right, we’d love to hear from you!) We very much want to continue with the Jams – we just need your help! :-). Contact me if you can think you can help.