Rob, On 04/05/16 13:56, Rob Nickerson wrote:
> 1. We have a scholarship fund in place to help with costs. Feel free to > apply to that. > > 2. At 75 EUR tickets are sold at a loss compared to variable costs > alone. When you add in fixed costs the loss per ticket is much bigger. > We can do this because of sponsorship. > > 3. Our price is in line with SotM 2013 and 5 EUR less than SotM US 2015. > > 4. The hotel deal is available to try to keep accommodation costs down. > > 5. We welcome anyone with contacts to airlines to come forward but can't > arrange any deals with them as is. > > Once again sorry that we can't get to the price level you want. Please > apply to the scholarship fund and send in sponsorship leads. Thanks for your detailed reply. I don't think I should apply for sponsorship, as surely there are people who need it way more than I do. My complaint here was about the cost of attending the event, not about the plane tickets or accommodation, which one can always handle in different ways. It is not that I can't afford the 75/100 EUR, but that I can't justify to myself to pay that money to attend a community event. If the tickets are sold at a loss, I guess the problem then is that the costs are too high. I don't know the cost structure of the SotM, as I have never attended one, so I can't comment. I have been involved in the organisation of many Debian events, where attendance is always free, and in the bigger event (DebConf) even food and accommodation is paid for the majority of attendees, because we consider it a way to give back to the community. Of course, this means finding many sponsors and really cheap venues, catering and places to sleep; and nobody gets paid to deliver a talk. We also provide travel sponsorship for a small amount of people, based on financial need. -- Martín Ferrari (Tincho) _______________________________________________ Talk-ie mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ie
