On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 09:34:39AM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote: > > For several of us, it is quite possible to make this choice > > We have to remember the people who don't have the option to pay and > people who contribute so much to Debian that it is just not right to ask > them to pay.
I'm perfectly aware that this is not possible for everybody. The rationale of my mail was to give a hint that there might be some people who have the choice could voluntarily (yes, we *definitely* should not ask them to pay) simply choose for this option to help out with budget issues to enable others coming as well. I know from other DebConf attendees in the past that they even if private persons applied as professionals for the very same reason which simply inspired me to do this and by doing so giving some signal that if all else might fail we could have this "extra resource" of money we do not need to spend from DebConf budget. > If enough of these people don't come, if they choose to attend other > conferences or participate intermittently over IRC, it could undermine > DebConf, as people are the most important part of an event. Then the > people who did pay haven't got such a good deal. I think you totally missinterpreted my intention. My intention was to enable people who can not pay to join because the needed amount for them does not need to be spend for me. > Instead of the survey suggestion, if we could ask people who share > Andreas' feelings to make some kind of PGP-signed pledge to pay the > professional fee, that may allow us to measure just how much of this > revenue can be safely included in the budget forecast. I admit I do anticipate some heavy reaction if we would ask people for following this idea. We should be prepared for the very same arguing you did above and I don't know whether such action would qualify as "asking" people to do so (which we should not as I said above). I admit when I sended my mail I was surely relying in the idea that some others might follow (if not this would not help that much budget-wise). However, it might be better to set up some list of "volunteer professionals" or whatever you might like to call (and you are right this should be based on a GPG signature) were we could carefully direct people to. In this aspect my plan was a bit half-baken. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team