[OSGeo-Conf] Access

[Paul Ramsey]

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 8:54 AM, Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org> wrote:
>
> Can we please return to the topic?

Barriers to access:

-- Distance

This is fundamentally difficult to deal with. Once you get beyond a
couple hundred miles, and start adding overnights, there is going to
be a cost, which will be "in the hundreds" (pick your currency) to
attending an event.

The obvious solution is just smaller conferences, but that dilutes the
attendance, and doesn't necessarily fulfill some of the goals of
"getting everyone together". No regional conference is going to get
the PostGIS team together -- we live in Victoria, Boston, the UK, etc.

Another semi-solution is the one used by ApacheCon, which basically
charges full commercial convention rates (about $1500+) to ordinary
attendees (who are presumably from corporate and government agencies)
and then comps and flies in select members of project teams to speak
(and meet).  O'Reilly conferences do a similar thing on a for-profit
basis, charging ordinary goers high registration and using that to
subsidize the "technical VIPs" who come and talk and share their
knowledge.

-- Registration

As it stands, it is not financially feasible to give complimentary
registration to more folks (see
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G2007_Discounts for examples of who
got freebies in 2007, the list for 2008 is similar). However, it is
easy enough to change that, simply raise the general registration and
use the extra funds to widen the scope of people given comps.

At that point, we enter new, uncharted waters: who, exactly, is
eligible for special treatment, and how many of them will there be?
Because we need to know how many new comps we have in order to raise
the general admission price enough.

-- Timing

If it is students we care about, then the mid-week conference is a
problem. Of course, the over-weekend conference is a barrier to
family-men/women.  So pick your poison. Our most egregious timing
barrier to date was our fateful ability to schedule on top of InterGeo
not once (2007), but twice (2008). (Hooray for us!)