On 5/17/07, David Schlesinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > This bothers me on several levels. First, it's a conference, as near as I > can tell. It says it is, first of all, it's GUADEC rather than GUADEP. > Second, it clearly does very conference-like things. Third, I couldn't > possibly justify taking a week's vacation on my employer's dime to go to "a > party". > It says "meet, plan, party" on the GUADEC web page. So I've been under the impression that "partying" was a big part of why I go there.
I've actually just spent a while looking through Wikipedia and reading about what it thinks conferences, parties, summits or conventions and reflected GUADEC and other Free Software meetings, in particular the Ubuntu Developer Summit I recently attended. I think (and this is going to be very subjective now) that all other conferences have been a lot more focused on results than GUADECs. UDS for example is focused on producing "blueprints" [1] that specify further progress in Ubuntu. Other conferences focused on presenting various products. GUADEC however has always primarily been about people, not about results. I never went there to learn or produce anything. (Do we have a "results of GUADEC 2006" page somewhere?) I went their to meet, plan and party with the other guys that are GNOME. I do also think companies realize that the solcial aspects are important and understand that it's a good thing to invest into allowing their employees to attend social getherings. Some companies certainly still have a hard time grasping this, but I think most of them get it. > If you want to pursue this metaphor, I guess some combination of the > sponsors and the Foundation itself are the "hosts". Do you really want to > have the collection of us making decisions about the guest list and issuing > specific invitations...? Because that'd seem to be the alternative. > </blunt> As far as I can see, this is not an alternative, but the Foundation is already doing exactly this. They allow rich people who can pay for themselves in automatically and from all the people who apply for sponsorship, they select who they invite. I'd even argue it's worse than if they'd just invite people. I guess that's even worse than just inviting people, since with the current method, people get uninvited. </blunt> > As one of GUADEC's sponsors, though, this all seems to say that we're > collectively being somehow stingy by not contributing even more to support > this "party". Either that, or that we need to somehow trim down the list of > "invitees" to the "party" match the budget we can put together solely from > contributions, to ensure that we don't run out of hors d'oeuvres and tonic > water. > I have no clue about the financial situation of GUADEC, but I don't think me or even 100 people paying 10 pounds or not will make a huge difference in the budget of the conference. In the original announcement it was hinted that the money was only necessary because you "simply cannot afford to have people register, pay nothing and then not turn up". [2] > GUADEC is an event for the whole GNOME community. If making it possible for > the whole GNOME community to attend leads to a compromise where those who > can afford to contribute are asked to, and stipends are made available to > those who can't afford to contribute (but who should be there anyway) that > seems reasonably fair to me. > I think this is a big point where we two differ. You seem to want to make it mandatory to pay. I don't like that. I'd much prefer the old way of paying the conference via sponsoring and donations. Cheers, Benjamin [1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-sevilla/ [2] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/thos/2007/05/15/0 _______________________________________________ guadec-list mailing list guadec-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/guadec-list
