Benjamin wrote
>
>I always thought it's more of a get-together of all the hackers
>sponsored by people that appreciate the work we are doing. Everybody
>working on GNOME was invited.
and
>For me this is the fundamental question if this is more like a party
>where the host invites people he appreciates or if this is more like a
>conference where interested people are asked to pay a fee?
This bothers me on several levels. First, it's a conference, as near as I can tell. It says it is, first of all, it's GUADEC rather than GUADEP. Second, it clearly does very conference-like things. Third, I couldn't possibly justify taking a week's vacation on my employer's dime to go to "a party".
If you want to pursue this metaphor, I guess some combination of the sponsors and the Foundation itself are the "hosts". Do you really want to have the collection of us making decisions about the guest list and issuing specific invitations...? Because that'd seem to be the alternative.
As one of GUADEC's sponsors, though, this all seems to say that we're collectively being somehow stingy by not contributing even more to support this "party". Either that, or that we need to somehow trim down the list of "invitees" to the "party" match the budget we can put together solely from contributions, to ensure that we don't run out of hors d'oeuvres and tonic water.
GUADEC gets bigger every year, and the costs of putting on a week-long conference of this size are significant. The rate at which costs grow for such things is non-linear with respect to attendance.
The vast bulk of the legwork and heavy lifting is contributed by volunteers (many of whom are effectively paid by their employers to do this, more invisible support), and the majority of the costs are defrayed by sponsors, as far as I know.
GUADEC is an event for the whole GNOME community. If making it possible for the whole GNOME community to attend leads to a compromise where those who can afford to contribute are asked to, and stipends are made available to those who can't afford to contribute (but who should be there anyway) that seems reasonably fair to me.
There certainly are parties at GUADEC, and good ones; as far as I know, there's never a fee "above and beyond" for attending these. But I don't believe GUADEC itself is, or ever has been, simply "a party".