[Eg-oversight-board] Evergreen Conference 2014 budget

[rogan at roganhamby.com]

I don't know what to say in response to Dan's points but want to make sure we do talk about this.  In a perfect world the conference is much larger and able to absorb these expenses.  However, in our case the speakers make up a pretty good chunk of attendees as well.  My gut instinct is to say something that is utterly unviable which is to say that speakers from outside the community don't have to pay but that gets into definitions of what is the community and what is a community member.

Now, in my case I would pay the fee regardless of speaking and I'm confidant many others would too.  I don't know.  I don't know, I'm sitting here in a pleasant post dim sum haze and not coming up with any great thoughts.

Apr 11, 2013 03:32:04 PM, dan at coffeecode.net wrote:
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
>