On 23 June 2017 at 21:42, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Oh and my reason for starting this thtead is bc i dont think we should ask for reg fee until funding is decided. It would simplify and lessen confusion imho.
~m
I don't think there is a way we can please everyone here. The reason for asking the fee was to get the N% of declared attendees who don't show up to not sign up. This was an expensive throw-away funding on food, t-shirts, and other bookings that could have been spent on getting people who needed funding there. However the opposite is also true, there are some M% of people who are not going to sign up because they needed funding in the first place.
That said, we should not put too much correlation and causation into people attending this year. There are multiple reasons bookings are down for this and many other shows: 1. People from outside the US are less likely to travel to the US currently. * 2. People inside the US are less likely to travel this year it would seem.* 3. While we are getting great rates, they aren't the 'normal' fudcon or local LUG rates various people may be looking at. Even with funding promised that may be more than people want to take on.
Add onto that we want this to be a do-er event and many people go to shows to listen to talks versus doing stuff. They may not feel they can do stuff or that there is anything they want to do do when they get there. Many others are going to look at what is going to be done and then decide whether they want to go. Which would happen whether or not there was a payment at the front.
* From reading about other tech events, they are seeing around a 50% drop of outside of the US currently and they are seeing a drop 20-30% drop of inside the US.
On June 23, 2017 9:39:54 PM EDT, "Máirín Duffy" duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
There's also:
- i *really* want to come to flock but i cannot afford it on my own (US
is expensive, visas are expensive, maybe they are a student or unemployed or otherwise not of means) so i need funding help and part of the reason im proposing a talk is to better my funding chances but if i dont get funding i cant go and i dont want to pay for reg when i cant even go
I think #3 is like 80% of the cases here at the least.
Making people pay to register for something theyre not able to go to seems scammy to me.
~m
On June 23, 2017 12:24:58 PM EDT, Josh Boyer jwboyer@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 12:17 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 04:57:01PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Many speakers (~20) did not register for Flock when submitting their proposals. They didn't want to register because they weren't going to come unless their proposal was accepted.
Maybe this is harsh, but my first reaction is that people who aren't interested in coming if their session proposal isn't accepted have the wrong motiviation for Flock anyway. I think we solve this simply by requiring registration to submit.
There are two main cases:
- I want to attend Flock, but I cannot get my employer/sponsor to
fund it if I do not get a talk accepted 2) I want to attend Flock to present about $my_thing but that's about it
You can message to death about not needing to be accepted to be part of Flock in the case of 1, but that's a really hard concept for employers to get their head around. It comes off as "yeah, send your people to Flock because we want more attendees!", which makes it no different than any other conference that just wants people. If you add an explicit *invite* system for people needed and why they are needed, that helps. But I suspect you'll have a lot of people not registering until they get their talk submitted because of that reason.
The second case is probably more in line with your reaction. I'm sure there are people that fall somewhere in between those two though.
josh ________________________________
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