[foss4g2014] Scholarships

[Darrell Fuhriman]

Rather than try to reply to all the great comments individually, I wanted to add a bit of clarification — the confusion is my fault for my hastily sent e-mail.

I think there are two different things people are thinking when I say "scholarship":

1) Free or discounted admission to students, possibly in exchange for helping with the conference.
2) A grant for someone, not necessarily a student, to attend who may not have been able to otherwise.

We've already made plans for (1) — essentially a heavily discounted admission in exchange for a day of work, up to some maximum (I think we decided around 60, I need to look at my notes). This is included in our current budget (mostly in the "percent complimentary admissions" budget item.) My argument for making it small, but greater than zero is that you want your volunteers to have a little bit of skin in the game so they're less likely flake out on you — but maybe I'm not being fair to them.

I was actually wanting to talk about (2). Jacob's link to OSCON (http://www.oscon.com/oscon2013/public/content/scholarships), or the SoTM.us version (waived fees + $500 travel grant) is much more in-line with what I was thinking.

And to David's point — I'm bringing this up now explicitly so we can budget for it. :)

Without whipping out the spreadsheet, I think the costs to the bottom line are something like this:

— Cost of catering: ~$300
— 1 Workshop ~$500 (if we want to offer this)
— 5 nights hotel: ~$750
— 1 flight: ~$800 (depending)

Total: $2350

I don't count the waived conference admission, since the marginal cost of another attendee is primarily the catering. I do count the workshop, because space is limited and that's revenue forgone.

If we do decide to offer a scholarship, I'd like to be targeted at women and minorities. If we do offer more than one, I'd like to set aside at least 50% of them for women and minorities.

Thoughts?

Darrell

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