[OSGeo-Conf] FOSS4G 2018 Dar es Salaam Submission - Questions

[till.adams at fossgis.de]

Dear Mark,

sorry for my late reply, I took my weekend, so I did not check any 
emails here.

This is off-list, as the question period ended, so just my personal 
view as a person, not a member of ConfComm ;-)

Regarding your targeted conference fee: Our view was, that +/- 50€ will 
presumably not make the difference for many people deciding to come or 
not. If you regard all costs such as flight, accommodation, beer, food, 
a conference fee of +/-50€ does not make that big difference. We fixed 
our prices rather late (to be honest, we did this few days before we 
actually opened registration). Before that, we communicated a price 
range, so we had some time to wait for sponsors to come in and with 
that, lower our fees.
Just a hint when you talk about extremely reduced tickets: Always take 
into account, that every ticket causes costs on your side, most of it is 
food. So giving a reduced ticket is fine, but I would at least care, 
that you can cover your costs with that (and BTW, be prepared, that 
many, many people will ask for a free ticket ;-)).

Asking the ConfCom is always a good way: You won't find another group 
of people, that mostly already organized a FOSS4G ;-). For Bonn with 
Steven (Feldman) we had our "personal financial supervisor". Steven was 
the official OSGeo financial supervisor, but he helped us a lot on 
various fields, not only regarding the financial stuff. As you will not 
request for seed money, I am kind of unsure, whether you need an 
official supervisor or not, but as said, this was really helpful for us.

Regards, Till




Am 2016-12-02 20:02, schrieb Mark Iliffe:
> Dear Till,
>
> Many thanks for your questions and comments - I’ve responded
> in-line. Many thanks for sending over the budget for Bonn, it’s very
> useful. I think broadly, there is a question on our cost for the
> conference. We believe that having a $500 price point for a ticket
> would raise attractiveness for international attendees to come to Dar
> (for me, this would mean that the cost saving would be marginally
> higher for London to Dar es Salaam when compared to London to Bonn,
> considering the inclusion of hotels and flights).
>
> I’m raising this now to the OSGeo Conference committee, is this an
> advisable path to continue on? To stress, we believe that this
> diversity and attractiveness of price for attendees will bring a new
> set of attendees to a FOSS4G - one that also allows for a new group 
> to
> be untapped. As a LOC we’d be very interested in hearing
> perspectives on this.
>
> I hope the answers below resolve your queries in this mail, I’ve
> responded to the workshop questions in the separate thread with
> yourself and Eli.
>
> MTFBWY,
>
> Mark
>
>> On 1 Dec 2016, at 15:12, till.adams at fossgis.de [1] wrote:
>>
>> Dear Dar-LOC!
>>
>> I have some questions too. Some of my points were already covered by
>> earlier questions. So I concentrate mainly on things we did (I am
>> still under impact of the 2016 conference ;-))
>>
>> 1. I would encourage you to make kind of "financial risk analysis":
>> This needs to play around with some numbers as number of
>> participants, little more complicated for you, as you plan to have
>> massively different fees. But also inherits the question: What do we
>> have to pay, if we cancel (worst case scenario) the event 12, 6, 3,
>> 1 month before? This is of course due to contracts you likely are
>> going to sign in the future…
>
> We broadly aim to make this FOSS4G as inclusive as possible, to be
> clear this is a priority for our LOC. I agree that we will undertake 
> a
> much more comprehensive financial risk assessment once an award
> decision is made to ensure that we have a FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam. We
> would be willing to compromise on our fee structure, however, we need
> to ensure that for local community delegates (students + innovation
> hub attendees) have access to a discounted rate - we could explore
> using a discount code for this to ensure that a small subset has
> access to the conference, this discounted rate is for local students
> and innovation hub members (ie. graduated students). Considering the
> local environment, anything more than $100 would be too prohibitive.
>
>> 2. Sponsorship: I miss bronze and supporter sponsors - keep in mind,
>> that we have a landscape of many SME's with a stress on the "S" - so
>> many of our OSG-Companies may like to have a smaller sponsor
>> package. The "supporter package" which was created for one/two-man
>> companies, that allows them to "donate" smaller amount of money by
>> paying a more expensive ticket (in Bonn this package was 1.500.-
>> instead of 790.- reg. fee).
>> See our sponsorship page at
>> http://2016.foss4g.org/sponsoring.html#sponsor-packages [2]
>> This package was created because there was a need for this, so I
>> would encourage you to offer this as well.
>
> Just to make that point clear: From our ~100k of sponsorship, we
> created nearly 50% from bronze/supporter s
>
>> Many thanks - we’ll ensure that’s added to our sponsorship
>> packages - within our existing budget we only listed institutions/co
> rprises that had positively responded regarding sponsorship. As
> detailed in our proposal, we plan to have a dedicated team that
> aggressively pursues it, they will incorporate this suggestion into
> their plan.
>
> 3. The PCO cost calculation looks quite high for me as well, but I do
> not know,. what they exactly will do for you. We calculated much 
> more,
> than we used, because we did a lot of things on our own. No need to 
> do
> this, but
>
>> rict them. So perhaps you may aim on a kind of support contract with
>> the PCO and the concrete payment is connected to the ToDo's they do
>> for you. For us that worked quite well.
>>
>> In using the PCO previously, they had provided us with a full
>> service from the facilitation of the sessions to recording them.
>> This cost also reflects the streaming to non-attending FOSS4G
>> delegates.
> div class="">
> 4. I am honest: Our B2B meeting happened more by coincidence, but the
> feedback was overwhelming and I guess especially for your region, a
> possibility to get people in possible contact with business partners
> is a good idea. See
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] mailto:till.adams at fossgis.de
> [2] http://2016.foss4g.org/sponsoring.html#sponsor-packages
> [3] http://www.alcovetz.com/