[Eg-oversight-board] Evergreen Conference 2014 budget

[Dan Scott]

On Mon, Apr 08, 2013 at 02:43:40PM -0400, Kathy Lussier wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Attached is the budget for the 2014 Evergreen Conference to be
> discussed/approved at the Oversight Board meeting later this week.
> The budget is based on pricing to host the conference at the Boston
> Marriott Cambridge from March 19 – 22, 2014. The earlier dates for
> the conference were scheduled to keep Boston-area prices affordable
> for our attendees. We are still working with the venue to finalize
> some details before forwarding along the contract to the SFC.

Hi Kathy:

One of the speakers from outside of the traditional Evergreen community
noted his surprise & concern that speakers were expected to still pay
conference registration fees. Our policy may be a bit unusual for open
source conferences (most of my recent experience has been with the
PostgreSQL community, which does cover the registration fees for
speakers at PGCon and PostgresOpen, for example).

As a thought experiment, for EG2013 there are 42 speakers listed. At the
early bird rate for EG2014, that would work out to almost $9,000, which
would put the conference deeply into the red given the current budget.
I'd like to urge conference planning committees to start trying to work
towards a policy along these lines, but it might not be feasible for
EG2014 unless "exciting new sponsorship opportunities!" open up.

An iterative step might be a speaker registration discount - say, $100 -
the loss of revenue from which might be able to be made up by increasing
the early & regular registration fees by $20 to $230/$280 respectively.

One other comment from a sponsor this year was some surprise that there
was no space for vendor tables... just as a heads-up, I don't know if
that really ends up being a revenue generator if you also have to rent
the space from the facility.

Dan