[OSGeo-Conf] question from non-member of the conference-committee

[Darrell Fuhriman]

Obviously I'm biased towards students, because I'm also an instructor at PSU (as is Percy), but I think a student presence is very important.

I think the value to students can be pretty significant, especially in light of the academic track. For the student of all things geospatial,  who is specifically interested in Open Source/Data then FOSS4G is the only conference out there. Huge conferences like AAG are not focused enough, and obviously the Esri UC is not the right venue.  It's one reason we, as PDX-OSGeo try to have presence at all the regional conferences, too.

And of course for students, it's also a great place to make contacts for future job prospects, or to meet potential graduate advisors. 

While I'm here, I'm also going to merge in the question of student discounts. 

I do tend to agree that giving a discount to everyone deserving would become quickly unmanageable. That being said, I don't consider student discounts to be superfluous, or unmanageable.

It's true that discounting registrations for students who travel long distances is probably not as necessary, since the registration is not a big chunk of the overall expense. (On the other hand, I remember from my own grad school days the degree of discomfort to which students would subject themselves in order to save a few bucks while traveling to a conference.)

My proposed solution, and one I've seen work well, is that the student discount would be tied to something else – volunteer labor. Iin order to get the discount you need to volunteer for one full day. There's always tons of work to be done, from manning the registration desk to passing the microphone during Q&A sessions, etc. That, I think is well worth a discount. Otherwise that labor would have to be recruited, always an unreliable option, or it would have to be paid for. I think "paying" students with a discount neatly solves both problems. It also means you could decide to cap the number of student discounts given to the number of volunteers you expect to need. 

Would that mean the discount would go primarily to local students? Yep. But I'm OK with that.

The next question is, what should the discount be? I don't have an absolute answer to that, but my gut feeling is to set the student price at not more than $200, and less if we can.

Darrell


On Jul 3, 2013, at 14:42, Jachym Cepicky <jachym.cepicky at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I just had again a look at both proposals, and I might miss some
> information about discount for students in the Portland proposal
> (please, correct me, if I'm wrong).
> 
> I hope, we all agree, that students are important part of FOSS4G
> conference for various reasons and it is in general good, to have them here.
> 
> Could you both bidders summarize in short, what are the benefits for
> students, so we would attract them to come to the conference?
> 
> Thanks a lot
> 
> Jachym
> -- 
> Jachym Cepicky
> Help Service - Remote Sensing s.r.o.
> jachym.cepicky at gmail.com
> HS-RS: jachym at hsrs.cz http://bnhelp.cz
> http://les-ejk.cz
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Conference_dev at lists.osgeo.org
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