On Sat, Jun 24, 2017, at 08:46 PM, charles profitt wrote:
On Sat, 2017-06-24 at 12:09 -0400, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> 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 is what I thought the registration was for. In this case I think
it is very easy to waive the registration fee for any accepted
speakers. If the registration fee is required to make the event happen
then we should have the acceptance of the session include an invitation
to register.
The message I took from the Council was separate the idea of presenting
from attending and make it clear that presenters are not giving talks,
they are helping us all do something. They are not inherently more
worthy of funding. If a presenter needs funding they should apply for
it. If they don't, then they don't have to apply. I don't think that
waiving reg fees for presenters is automatically a good idea. This
isn't being done for any group of people.
> 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.
How much is this a 'know and do' vs. a 'learn and do'? If we are more
of a 'learn and do' then registration may pickup once people see the
sessions that are accepted.
I agree and hope this is the case.
> * 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.
I agree. Right now travel to the US is potentially an issue with
bringing electronics (which a doer conference would require). I really
do think the atmosphere around US travel at this point is causing a
decline in attendance.
----
I may have read things incorrectly or not properly expressed myself in
previous emails... so I would like to clarify.
I am interpreting the original issue posted as one regarding potential
presenters not being registered. I did not interpret this as an issue
with general attendees. Is that accurate?
My original suggestion was that anyone with an accepted session would
have their registration waived and be automatically registered. I
suggested this because it would avoid the issue of someone having to
pay for registration w/o knowing if their session had been accepted.
I also suggested having the application for funding (for presenters) be
part of the CFP process. This would allow the organizers to choose to
decline a presenter if there was not enough to fund their attendance.
This would avoid the issue of accepting the session only to find out
the presented is unable to attend w/o funding. It would also ensure
that we have a presenters funding request info.
The Council was very direct in their intention to disconnect funding
from talking to encourage those participating to apply. This does mean
that for speakers they have to fill out two multi-part forms instead of
one. I don't feel like this overhead was unreasonable.
I have not gone through the process so I am not sure if that is
already
how things are being done... so I may be way off-base here.
----
As for attendees who are not holding sessions and funding. We could
provide the ability for there to be conditional registrations. In
general having registration fees is a 'must do' to avoid issues of
spending money on food, services, swag that will go unused if people do
not show up.
What I think really got missed in this process by accident was trying to
better identify from presenters who needed to be present in order for
that do-session to be successful. This is something I'd like to explore
more, pending feedback from the actual event.
----
In general it would be great if a way could be found to ensure that the
financial risk be minimized for both Fedora and the potential attendees
/ presenters. Getting to such a solution is not easy, but tweaking
things to make it better is a positive path.
I think the Funding FAQs are indicating that this is the general goal.
Those were written after this email chain.
regards,
bex
>
> I hope I got understood properly and better explained what my thoughts
> were.
>
> Charles
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