[OSGeo-Conf] 2011 Next Step: Question period and voting

Paul Ramsey pramsey at cleverelephant.ca
Mon Apr 26 17:59:55 EDT 2010


On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 6:49 AM, Venka <venka.osgeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wonder if expensive Convention Center's or hotels
> could be avoided and we could have a more modest
> the venue at some university or government
> research institution.

I'm in North America, so my travel costs to Denver are modest. Let's
assume the conference fee is the same as Barcelona:

- Flight = $600
- Hotel = $120 * 5 nights = $600
- Meals = 5 * $20 = $100
- Conference fee = $750

Except for people living the in actual venue city, fees are currently
about 1/3 of the overall cost of attending the conference.

Now, historically venue costs have been about 10-25% of the budget and
food costs about 33%. Other big ticket items include AV support (both
technical staff and equipment rentals) at around 10% of the budget and
workshop computers at about 10% of the budget.

To substantially reduce expenses you have to substantially reduce
*all* the expense categories at once, which is not so easy.

And if you manage to somehow cut the expenses and the admission fee by
half (and make no mistake, it will reduce aspects of conference
quality, most particularly moving away from a real conference venue),
you only cut my personal conference cost by about 16%.

Anyhow, the whole discussion is moot: any venue, whether a hotel, a
convention center or a university facility, that can handle a 1000
person conference will be a "real", "expensive" conference venue, with
all the attendant issues and expenses that implies. This is not MUM1,
it's a different beast.

P.


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