Up North

Dave: First of all, did I ever say that I thought that Guadec was free to organize? Of course it costs, and people have requested seing what it costs and where the money is spent ever since the registration fees last year. It would defintely be easier for everyone to see where their money is going.

I do know that it costs money, but it would be interested to see how much money is spent on flying in hackers and how much is spent on flying in speakers with little or no connection to GNOME.

Dave, so where can I find information about sponsoring for Guadec? I can’t find anything now and I couldn’t when I looked a while back.

I’m pretty sure that people have no ideas flying in other hackers is worth the money but flying in some of the speakers that doesn’t have anything to do with GNOME to bost the commercial aspect of GNOME I know for a fact that a lot of people have problem with.

First of all, thanks Owen for explaining the different levels a bit. It’s not however the actual cost that I have a problem with (even though I do think that 150€/gnome hacker in a GNOME related company is a bit high) but rather the attitude that since we already invested endless hours of our lives in the project we might as well invest a bunch of dollars as well.

For this year, since you have been able to establish a price I guess you have some number showing that this is the amount of money needed to bring in those that requested endorsement? Or is it just based on the the-more-we-get-the-more-we-can-get-here thinking?

I think it would be much more welcome if there was a budget produced and shown which clearly said that we want to raise this much money to be able to get those that requested aid to get there. We’ve raised this much now, please all help by making donations or sponsoring. It would also be nice to see how many where actually payed to get there due to the registration fees and how much where spent on other things (like flying in keynote speakers etc).

What else is that I find it funny that at least we (Imendio) has not been contacted regarding sponsoring and when I was looking at the site, now and a while back, I couldn’t find any information about these different sponsoring levels that seems to be there.

I don’t want to whine about supporting the foundation, this has nothing to do with this. I just feel that this is the totally wrong way of doing it in a community like GNOME.

So, it’s time for Guadec again, I’m surprised to see the same crappy mistake being done this year again. This year even worse, this year even speakers get charged an entry fee.

The only fee I think can be justified is the non-member professional fee. All other fees are totally counterproductive. There are a lot of companies involved in GNOME these days, this is GOOD for GNOME, if these companies have to chose which to send to the conference and which not to send becaues of the in my opinion high fees that would SUCK.

Do I sound angry? If so, good, because I’m pissed off to say the least. This is a hackers conference, for hackers to get together and discuss the future of GNOME. Or should we do a Guadec Reloaded for that. I guess this is the Boston Summit, this development will only lead to hackers going to Boston Summit and not to Guadec…

As far as I can tell the Guadec organizers this year hasn’t tried very hard to find sponsors for Guadec to avoid having to charge, at least I’ve not been contacted by them. Well… I guess it’s easier to just put a charge not on the web page and invest the efforts in setting up an online payment system…