[Conferences-discuss] YAPC budget

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Tue, 26 Mar 2002 22:09:46 -0500


With permission, I'm forwarding a message from Adam Turoff (Ziggy) of
YAS explaining how YAPC is budgeted.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

------- Forwarded Message

Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 15:19:09 -0500
From: Adam Turoff <ziggy@panix.com>
To: David Ascher <DavidA@ActiveState.com>
cc: jeremy@zope.com, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org>, psf-board@python.org
Subject: Re: [PSF-Board] checks cashed

On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 11:21:09PM -0800, David Ascher wrote:
> > Is that how YAPC works?  I have two conflicting impressions from
> > David's explanation at the last meeting:  1) That's it's most
> > pay-as-you-guy; expenses are covered primarily by attendee fees.  2)
> > They need some money upfront to cover fixed costs.
> 
> AFAIK, it's 1).  It's easy to check.  Ziggy?

Here's the model:

	300 attendees @ $100/person:  $30,000
	Sponsorships (approx):        $20,000
				      -------
	Total:                        $50,000

>From that, the attendance fees cover the facility and start to cover
basic catering.  The sponsors fill in with the rest of the conference
cost (breakfast, lunches, one dinner) and swag (proceedings, tshirts,
lanyards, tote bags).  Catering is the most expensive line item,
followed by facilities, followed by everything else.  Speaker expenses
are not covered.

The total from sponsors is dependant on a large number of factors,
including the health of the tech sector, donations in kind (O'Reilly
has had extra totebags drop shipped the past), cost of the venue, etc.

The expectation is that the attendance fees will cover use of facilities
for 3 days in a university setting; McGill was cheap and quite well
suited, but UofMaryland's conference center (run by Marriott) was out
of the question (upwards of $100/pp/day facilites cost).


As to how the financial engineering is handled, I don't have a
definitive answer at the moment.  My gut feeling is that most of
the attendance fees are collected well in advance; very little
on-site registration is performed.  So the registrations should
suffice for booking the facilities and catering, but obviously some
sponsorship money is required as well.

Z.


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