On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 11:15:36AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote: > I recently heard/discussed about the short money problems and the > impact it has on communication with participants to the conference, > especially when it comes at the org. team making requests as tentatives to > lower the budget on lodging and such topics.
this is not really new. we have tried to squeze as much out of the budget as possible for every debconf so far. we always asked people to unload the conference budget by trying to pay as much as they could compfortably afford. your aim is not to provide a conference and pay for much as possible but to provide a conference for as many as possible. We try to be open to everyone who actually makes sense to have at a conference. But we are still selective. from previous conferences we know that we get requests from people who are most interested in a visa, or for a chance for a fee vacation. we know of people who came to Helsinki without much of a debian background or any intention to build one in the future or do much besides hanging out or drinking. Aparently these people did not go to a single talk, for example. yet debconf gets more popular and we try very hard to pick out the bad apples without throwing out the good ones. this is not new, though. This year there were also people who expected an eternal debian day with lots of introductory talks all the time and we tried to tell them in a friendly way that they were coming to the wrong place. By cutting down on breakfeast and setting a hard limit on the reconfirmation date we managed to free enough money to have a money reserve to cope (hopefully) with surprises that certainly will come. > As an outsider, it is my understanding that the fact that the Debconf > organization is pretty short on money is not advertised as widely as > it could be, which makes most registered participants pretty likely to > not understand some of the requests from the org. team or even the > negative answers by the org. team to some of their requests and/or > expectations. if this is about the request from Alexander about starting to prepare for debcamp (in that mail sent to all people indicating to be arriving during debcamp), this is not new at all. we did the same thing in oslo, Puerto Allege and helsinki. In helsinki i used even stronger words then Alexander did this year. (I think i wrote something like "if you just intent to surf the web and read mail please stay home, you can do that there just as well.) That is why i asked Alexander to write that mail this year, since he has a good way of making friendly requests. I was quite pleased with his mail, acually. We try to encourage working in teams since we belive in it (working as a team ourselfs). But working on debian alone is fine just as well. I would think that discussing debian and social matters is very important (and an unique opportunity that debconf/camp cna provide), too. Having fun during that and in between is great. The reason we send out these mails before every debconf is that we noticed a significant difference in both productivity and contentment of the ones that come prepared and those that come to "just drop by and work on something" without a clear idea what that might be. > In short, it's probably a Good Idea to just say "hey, we're really > short of money so every saved peso is worth it". this is what we do every year. this year we got ~130kUS in sponsorship requests which was not possible for us to life up to. (http://munin.debconf.org). Organizing debconf has always been a balance between being short on money and prioritizing the most important bits and making the confernece as pleasent, inspiring and cheap for the participants as possible. This gets harder as more people want to attend. we try very hard to stay open for everyone and at the same time not support scroungers and inform people that have a very wrong expectations about the conf and it´s technical and very special social nature. We are bound to make mistakes, even though we strive for balance and fairness. _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list Debconf-team@lists.debconf.org http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
