- E04 - Leadership! Google, Guido van Rossum, PSF

Alex Martelli aleax at mail.comcast.net
Mon Jan 9 11:07:42 EST 2006


Anton Vredegoor <anton.vredegoor at gmail.com> wrote:
   ...
> I looked it up: 160 euro (early registration). My food budget is about

_Free for conference staff_: i.e., you could choose to contribute either
by volunteering your work to help organize and run the conference, or by
paying.  This is a reasonably common arrangement at community-run
conferences.  Other conferences, such as Euro Oscon 2005 in Amsterdam,
which was professionally run, are free for _speakers_.

> But frankly indeed, I just don't even like to participate to events
> that claim to be open for all but don't even acknowledge that the
> barriers are extremely high compared to some participants budgets. Your

The secret is to get involved early, and actively contribute your time
and energy and skills; then, your budget will not be affected.

> hype about it being cheap has a very chilling effect on my enthousiasm,

If you have enthusiasm, show it actively, by giving positive
contributions in organizing and running the conference, or, depending on
the conference, by speaking at it.  THIS makes it cheap.

Some conferences may have a little budget (put together by pooling the
contributions of those who choose to pay to attend, minus venue costs)
for "special invitees", that may attend for free, in order to allow
participation to a few who were unable to actively contribute as
organizing staff, and couldn't make it otherwise; in some cases this may
extend to contributing to travel expenses.  Such budget is always very
limited, so just a few people may be helped this way, but if you're
active in the community, even if unable to actually help as staff, it's
worth applying (early on, and together with an offer to help to whatever
limited extent you may despite geography, of course).

> it's the same way with pypy congresses, which I also would have liked

I know of no such things as pypy "congresses".  There are pypy
*sprints*, and there is no cost to register for them -- all you have to
do is show up and work (coding, documenting, etc).

> to attend (and this thing even seems to be sponsored by public EU
> money).

50%, yes (the other 50% must come from private contributions, that's a
EU rule for research projects).  It used to be thought that some of the
EU money could be used to help pay for sprint participants' travel
expenses, but apparently something has gone wrong on that score
(probably some EU administrative requirement) -- I didn't ever see any
of the travel-expense-help money that was promised to me on one
occasion, so I had to swallow that cost myself.

However, pypy sprints have been held, for example, in Amsterdam, so for
a NL resident travel costs (and there never were any other) should have
been truly minute.

> google), but IMO it remains true that one needs at least one link to
> corruption to be able to post to usenet.

If you define every academic center and every private firm as
"corruption", yep -- Usenet is typically accessed through those.


Alex



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