On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 09:36:36PM -0400, charles profitt wrote:
Many of the other conferences I have attended automatically cover the registration fee for any accepted speakers. Also, if the speaker needs funding they included that in the application...
We want to decouple community funding from speaking, particularly because speaking is not supposed to be the highlight of the conference. They are related but shouldn't be attached. We intentionally split out the different costs, and speakers are welcome to ask for financial assistance for the registration fee.
I know it's standard for that to be covered for conferences, but that's usually also for conferences where the registration fee is a significant amount of money (hundreds or thousands of dollars). In this case, if the registration fee is a financial burden for *anyone* who should be at Flock, we want to help regardless of what shape their contribution takes.
I think the only issue there is people who would like to attend, but do not have a session approved -- how do we handle that scenario?
I don't think this is a special case.
If we are funding someone why would we not include the registration fee in that funding?
We want to get as many people there as possible. I know for example SUSE's funding for community conferences is a flat 80%. We wanted to be more flexible than that and possibly help people for whom the other 20% is a big problem.
With a binary all-expenses-paid or nothing checkbox, maybe we help one person a lot and someone else not at all. With this system, we might be able to get both people to the conference. Or maybe even more than just those two.