About the Conference

With inspiring presentations, hands-on workshops, social activities, and more, the WRRF Conference brings together over 200 middle & high school students and adult mentors from over 30 different schools and community organizations each year.

Though most participants hail from the San Francisco Bay Area, some travel from as far as Napa, Woodland, Seaside, and Monterey, or even participate remotely from outside California. But no matter where they're from, participants are able to exchange knowledge, and support each other as individuals, as teams, and as a community.

We are always looking for venues to bring our Conferences to life!

If you have access to a venue that could serve as an event space for interactive sessions, roundtable discussions, demonstration booths, social activities, and more, please consider hosting us!

The Conference usually takes place each year on a weekend in October or November, across either one or two days (depending on venue and volunteer availability).

For a typical Conference, the space requirements are:

• 6-8 rooms, capable of seating at least 30 people each for sessions (having a few rooms that can support 60-80+ people would be helpful for more popular sessions). Projectors, speakers, Internet connections (wired or wireless), and whiteboards should be available in each room, and it would also be ideal if at least some of those rooms had resilient surfaces and many accessible power outlets to support sessions involving hands-on work (e.g. soldering, hardware disassembly, driving a robot around, etc.)
• An additional large room or space capable of holding around 150 people (seated or not), for event opening and closing ceremonies, and for use as an exhibit hall for booths
• An open outdoor space, e.g. a stretch of lawn or similar, for social activities such as dodgeball

The planning committee may request additional spaces and/or resources to support additional sessions, event partners, or other components of the event that may vary from year to year.

This is a not-for-profit, volunteer-driven event, run by WRRF (Western Region Robotics Forum) - a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit in operation since 2003. Though a nominal attendance fee is charged, most of it goes right back into the event to cover volunteer food, attendee refreshments, event supplies, and facility fees incurred (if any). Depending on available resources, we sometimes also offer the option for attendees to pay extra to have a full lunch provided (rather than just refreshments).

Therefore, we would greatly appreciate your sponsorship of our usage of your space! The cost savings are passed to attendees, enabling us to provide a more accessible event. We are happy to provide proof of nonprofit status and liability insurance as needed. Also, know that we are willing to comply with any and all COVID-related regulations your facility may enforce.

If you're interested in helping to host an upcoming or future Conference, please reach out to the Conference Committee Co-Chairs at workshops@wrrf.org, who can answer any questions you might have as well. Thank you for considering supporting us!

The 2023 WRRF Conference Planning Committee is (listed alphabetically by first name):

Co-Chairs

Clayton Ou
Shweta Arun

Members

Beverly Xu, FRC 649
Cerisa Katchmart, FRC 1967
Joseph Yuen, FRC 4159
Kamalika Karthikeyan, FRC 2643
Kathryn Raynaud-Richard, FRC 100
Niti Reddy, FRC 2135
Parnika Kamath, FRC 649
Saara Piplani, FRC 972

The planning committee would like to give a special thanks to Aanya Bhardwaj, Aidan Ferrer, Craig Sipple, David Giandomenico, and Nick Gellrich for their support.

The planning committee uses the following software for their work:

BitBucket Cloud, Canva, Google Drive, Jira, Python, Scribus, Slack

We'd like to thank their development teams for making such great software available to the public!

(The planning committee did not receive any compensation for making the statements above.)