On 9 April 2013 14:15, Rob Lister <[email protected]> wrote: > So, unless I'm missing something, you have introduced a late fee without > warning and closed "Early Bird" registration a week early? - Because of > demand. >
Well… not quite. 1) UKNOF has always offered a limited number of spaces in meetings - space and sponsor funding restrictions. In the past, London UKNOF meetings have been restricted mainly to around 100 people.. a couple of cases we had up to 120. Whenever we reached the limit, we closed off registrations (taking into account our experience of no-shows). 2) The Registrations Page for the upcoming UKNOF meeting showed a max 125 registrations available. This was increased to 135 when we were able to secure further sponsor funding. This was information publicly available. (we have now increased this again to take into account paid registrations). 3) All that we are doing here now is to close off the free registrations, and instead of turning people away as we would normally have done, we are offering further registrations at a discounted fee to begin with for those who wish to attend. Is it not better to give people an option to be able to attend, albeit at a cost, rather than turning them away as we have done in the past? UKNOF registration has always been on a FCFS basis and nothing has changed with this… except we are now offering those who missed the free registration slots the opportunity to attend. And yes, the free registration had to close a week earlier than we expected - exactly due to demand. :-) We would have loved to have offered more free spaces - I'm presuming you will assist in finding more sponsorship funding for the September meeting and onwards? :) I don't think it's an unreasonable fee, but seems people are having to pay > when they could not have known about a change in policy to encourage people > to register earlier. Which I could probably have done, had I known that > fees > would apply for registering later. > The ONLY change in policy was to allow more people into the meeting rather than turn them away once all funded spaces had gone. Taking your own situation into account.. under our previous policy you would not have been able to register for the meeting anyway. Once the 135 spaces had disappeared - which happened last week, you would have come along today to register and the site would have informed you there were no more places left. > And neither do I want to make someone else pay by registering too > early before diary is firmed up, but then not showing up. > Agreed. UKNOF26 is on Friday 13 September. Diarise it now and block out other stuff. :) > That said, I appreciate that the money for places has to come from > somewhere > if the sponsorship isn't covering it entirely, and these things are > notoriously hard to predict. > Paying a small(ish) fee is better than not being able to attend at all, > I suppose. > The thing is UKNOF does not want attendees to pay for attending the meetings, hence why sponsorship funding is important. We also want to encourage newcomers, and network engineers from non-internet business companies. > I think it will possibly encourage no-shows and discourage newbies, as all > the regulars who will write scripts to register 3 seconds after > registration > opens will get the free places regardless of whether they know they can > attend or not, leaving newcomers to pay. :-) > This will be a sad thing to experience, however I am certain that all regular UKNOF attendees will not do this and they understand that such an action only jeopardises UKNOF activities and future meetings. > Perhaps there should be some reserved or discounted places for newcomers. > I'm waiting for.. "I'm a poor student/jobless tech.. If I bring my own > packed lunch and a flask of tea, can I come for £10?" :-) Hence the importance of getting bough sponsorship funding in. :) Regards Denesh
