Re: [guadec-list] Registration Fees for GUADEC 2007

["Benjamin Otte" <otte gnome org>]

On 5/17/07, David Schlesinger <lefty access-company com> wrote:
>  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".
It says "meet, plan, party" on the GUADEC web page. So I've been under
the impression that "partying" was a big part of why I go there.

I've actually just spent a while looking through Wikipedia and reading
about what it thinks conferences, parties, summits or conventions and
reflected GUADEC and other Free Software meetings, in particular the
Ubuntu Developer Summit I recently attended.
I think (and this is going to be very subjective now) that all other
conferences have been a lot more focused on results than GUADECs. UDS
for example is focused on producing "blueprints" [1] that specify
further progress in Ubuntu. Other conferences focused on presenting
various products.
GUADEC however has always primarily been about people, not about
results. I never went there to learn or produce anything. (Do we have
a "results of GUADEC 2006" page somewhere?) I went their to meet, plan
and party with the other guys that are GNOME.
I do also think companies realize that the solcial aspects are
important and understand that it's a good thing to invest into
allowing their employees to attend social getherings. Some companies
certainly still have a hard time grasping this, but I think most of
them get it.

>  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.
</blunt>
As far as I can see, this is not an alternative, but the Foundation is
already doing exactly this. They allow rich people who can pay for
themselves in automatically and from all the people who apply for
sponsorship, they select who they invite. I'd even argue it's worse
than if they'd just invite people. I guess that's even worse than just
inviting people, since with the current method, people get uninvited.
</blunt>

>  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.
I have no clue about the financial situation of GUADEC, but I don't
think me or even 100 people paying 10 pounds or not will make a huge
difference in the budget of the conference. In the original
announcement it was hinted that the money was only necessary because
you "simply cannot afford to have people register, pay nothing and
then not turn up". [2]

>  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.
I think this is a big point where we two differ. You seem to want to
make it mandatory to pay. I don't like that. I'd much prefer the old
way of paying the conference via sponsoring and donations.

Cheers,
Benjamin


[1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-sevilla/
[2] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/thos/2007/05/15/0