Re: GUADEC registration fee

[Aaron Weber <aaron ximian com>]

EUR 229 is not a large sum of money in (most) corporate books. Compared to airfare to Norway, it's a drop in the bucket.  I've seen shorter, less useful conferences with fees in the thousands. 

Besides, if a "professional" can't pay (or get their employer to pay) they can file subsidy requests, or say they're attending as hobbyists.  "Sure, I'm a programmer, but I also do this in my free time, and I'm representing myself, not my job, at the show." What are we going to do, run background checks on everyone who signs up as a hobbyist or student?

I say, let it stand.

a.

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 19:15 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 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.
>
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