[Eg-oversight-board] Evergreen Conference 2014 budget

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:
> 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).

The Evergreen Conference is also a library conference, and the
question of comping registration for presenters at library conferences
has been a matter of lengthy discussion and debate.

> 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.

I am not in favor of increasing the base registration fees in order to
fund comping or discounting registration for speakers; they're already
going to be higher for 2014 than previous years.

A couple things that I think could be considered for 2014 are:

- Comping the registration fee for paid speakers (if we're not doing
this already)
- Adding a specific budget line for registration fee comps for one or
more invited speakers.  I would define an invited speaker as one who
is specifically sought out to speak, as opposed to folks who submit
presentation proposals.  The expectation would be that invited
speakers would generally come outside the community of Evergreen users
and contributors, but that the conference committee or the program
committee would have discretion to invite whomever they think would
made a contribute to the speaker.

Of course, speaker discounts are something that can and should be
revisited each year as our coffers grow.  If/when we can afford it, I
could see doing a discount that is based on the number of
presentations - e.g., one presentation gets you a 30% discount, two
70%, and three get one fully comped.

That said, given the wherewithal, I would prefer reducing the base
registration fee over comping speakers.

> 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.

I think the decision to not have vendor tables was influenced by the
venue this year, but Ben can speak better to that.  I think offering
vendor tables will make it easier to attract sponsorships, but if a
venue isn't suited to it, I think this conference has shown that
tables aren't absolutely necessary.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
skype:  gmcharlt
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