Hi! So, I was asked to state my opinion on this matter, as a previous DC Organizer and all.
In Argentina, we didn't have too many $tourists registering from outside, due to the long distance flights and all. But to avoid $tourists from .ar, what I did was review every non-maintainer from .ar that registered, and ask them if they would volunteer for work during the conference. We had agreed that we would have 30 spots for these volunteers, so after those places were filled, we didn't allow any more non-maintainers from .ar. The plan worked out very well, only 2 or 3 of these people didn't do the work we were asking from them, the rest had fun while helping make the conference great (you might remember how the Front-Desk and a big part of the video-team was NOT staffed by attendees, but by local volunteers), and some of them ended up getting more involved in Debian. Now, it looks like the amount of people in this situation in NYC is similar, only that the cost per person is almost double what we had over here (350 USD vs 650 USD), so I can understand that allowing 27 unknown people might look like a lot of money not-well spent. Also, these people won't be expecting to do any work, if we don't ask it from them. My take on this would be: mail everybody except those 27 people saying that accom is covered, food is on the way, as Jimmy suggested; mail these 27 people saying that since they've asked for sponsored accom+food and we are tight on money, we'd like to know what their relationship to Debian is, and what their plans for DebConf are, before confirming that they'll actually get the sponsored accom (and eventually food). After that, if we are still "in the hole" as Jimmy put it, herb should meet and decide what to do about these 27 people, on a case by case basis. But asking these people to fill in their info _now_ will speed things up if a decision is needed, and will also maybe make them think twice if they are really bold enough to come to NYC for free. -- Besos, Marga _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
