tytso <ty...@mit.edu> writes: > This is a pretty well-explored problem space. There are a number of > organizations that help academic or FOSS organizations run conferences. > Examples of these include Usenix (which used to be the organization that > ran the Linux Kernel Maintainer's Summit), The Linux Foundation (which > now runs the Maintainer's Summit as well as Linux Plumbers Conference), > and Association Headquarters (which is a for-profit company that helps > non-profits run conferences as well as being their "legal entity", ala > SPI). These organizations don't need to be homed in the country where > the conference takes place. The Linux Foundation is based in the US, > but has run (or will be running) conferences in Canada, Korea, Japan, > China, Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic, etc.
> These organizations all employ profession event/conference planners, and > can handle signing legal contracts with hotels, caterers, restaurants, > etc., thus shielding the techies from legal liability, as well as > generally being able to do a much better job at running a conference > compared to techie who tries to pretend to be an event planner on the > side. The tradeoff is that while the conferences do tend to be more > polished, having professional, paid staff is expensive. And so > typically, to go down this path, the conferences need to hit up > corporate sponsors to help pay for the event. > Using one of these professional organizations is going to significantly > change the characgter of Debconf. Right, I'm fairly dubious that we want to go in that direction. That's wmy the mental model I had was more like the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), which avoids using professional event planners but still has a legal structure to limit liability, despite running conventions all over the world. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
