GUADEC registration fee

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hey,
	As people start registering for GUADEC this is bound to come up again
and again, so we may as well have a discussion here.

	See the registration fees on:

https://www.filonova.no/konferanser/guadec/registration.php

Professional                NOK 2000 / EUR 229 / USD 287
Student/Hobbyist            NOK 200  / EUR 23  / USD 29
Free registration request   See subsidy section below

	(The bit I'm commenting on is the "professional" fee - a large wad of
cash in anyone's book)

	From a brief discussion on irc, it seems that the idea behind such a
large fee is that only attendees who are being sponsored by their
employer should pay it, thereby increasing the corporate sponsorship of
the conference without having to chase companies at length.

	I've a number of concerns:

  1) The website isn't clear about this intent - it probably should be 
     "corporate sponsored attendee" or something. The last thing we want
     is for anyone else to be paying it because they don't understand
     the intent or, worse, that they decide they can't afford to come.

  2) What if the implication of such a large fee is that companies don't
     send (or send less) of their hackers to the conference. Is that 
     really what we want? Surely we want *more* hackers, not less?

  3) It sounds like the real problem here is that there is not enough 
     corporate sponsorship of the conference. Is the best solution 
     really to use attendees as cannon fodder in this struggle?

  4) Is the money being used to "make it a better conference" or "bring 
     more people to the conference"? I think the former has to be the 
     prime goal (at least, "more relevant people"). If the large
     registration fee is ear-marked to make the conference better and is
     meanwhile causing less people to be able to attend ...


	(I do understand how hard this conference is to organise - this mail
isn't intended as a general "you guys suck")

Cheers,
Mark.