[Inpycon] Everybody Pays Policy

[Anand B Pillai]

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On Thursday 26 September 2013 12:18 PM, Noufal Ibrahim wrote:
> atul jha <koolhead17 at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> 
> [...]
> 
>> Pycon is a community event not a event for profit.  Don`t
>> blindly follow policies of other country things work differently
>> here.

I generally agree with this principle of not blindly following
American policy here. I think I did mention it ealier when
this discussion opened saying PSSI frames its own policies.

We do need to frame local policies keeping in mind the Indian ethos.

> 
> As somone who's been involved in organising this for a while, I'm
> not "blindly" following anything. I genuinely think "everyone pays"
> is a good idea regardless of who came up with it.
> 
> Also, we're not looking to generate profit but an event does have 
> costs. We want to cover those in a way that allows us freedom to
> conduct the event as we wish.
> 
> To illustrate with an extreme case, if a sponsor said that they'd
> pay us a crore for branding the conference with their name and
> giving them the contact information of all the participation, we'd
> be able to to give free entry to every delegate and do everything
> in style but we'd say no.
> 
> [...]
> 
>> Its organizers responsibility to not select freeloaders.

It is probably not a good idea to give free entry to volunteers.
I kind of agree with the "Everybody pays" policy here.  Though
I think volunteers should not pay the full price but should
get some benefit of tiered pricing.

I would rather suggest to reserve a certain section of early bird
tickets for volunteers and co-ordinators instead. For example
if the early bird ticket volume size is "N" it should be made
rather N + V where V is the volunteer/co-ordinator population
size. Keep this as a separate early bird category.

We can identify volunteers using their email IDs early on
and only allow those email addresses to book from this slot.

This might be a way to avoid freeloaders.

> 
> The devil is in the details.
> 
> If you have concrete suggestions on how to identify and weed out 
> freeloaders without destroying the volunteer base, please post
> them here. Or better yet, pick up the job of volunteer coordinator.
> After all, advice is cheap.
> 
> 
>>> How difficult is it to pay cheques to speakers in that case?
> 
> Very very difficult. Like I said, the devil is in the details.

A way to solve this would again be to ask speakers to pay up
front and then refund the speakers who gave talks at the end of
the conference. Again something not too easy with the details
but possibly a way to identify speakers might be when they
register - I think PyCon US does this - You can register
as a regular attendee or a speaker.

I think we need to tweak the "Everybody pays policy" to suit
our local expectations.

> 
> 
> [...]
> 
> 


- -- 
Regards,

- --Anand

-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Software Architect/Consultant
anandpillai at letterboxes.org

Please note my updated email address <anandpillai at letterboxes.org>.
Kindly update your address books.

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