Sponsoring event attendees

[Robyn Bergeron]

On 02/14/2012 08:12 AM, Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-02-14 at 07:49 -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
>>
>> However, I have some additional input here.  For the Tempe FUDCon, we
>> made the case that we were having additional people from each region
>> come to participate to learn how to run a FUDCon, and to bring that
>> knowledge back to their respective regions.  And to that, I say,
>> MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, we now have plenty of people with the knowledge.
>> And yet, for Blacksburg, we had numerous people applying from out of
>> the country, with requests like, "I'm coming to teach about X," or
>> "I'm coming to learn about how to run a FUDCon," "I'm coming to engage
>> with other people from the teams I work on," etc., without any very
>> specific, concrete deliverables.  I think these requests (and grants)
>> need to be cut down drastically, or we should reconsider the idea of
>> just having one or two large fudcons a year, bring in as many people
>> as we can, and push people to enable smaller one-day events for
>> outreach in their regions.
> While reading your email I was thinking, what about inverting the
> process. Instead of saying: "I want to come because I have never been to
> a FUDCon and want to see how nice it is", you would nominate someone
> else: "I know XX wants to come but budget might be tight for him and I
> think he should have a chance to come. I want to meet in face to face
> and work with him on x, y and z".
> I realize nominations have pros and cons and can be circumvent (I
> request for you, you request for me), but maybe worth considering.
Well, I think that by and large, the reference to it being circumvent is 
precisely the problem that inode0 was referring to as far as "who 
decides who goes" - the people who want to go are, by and large, the 
people who show up to vote.

When people fill out sponsorship tickets/requests, they are explicitly 
asked to state what it is that they wish to accomplish by being present 
at the FUDCon.  While I think that this bar can be a little lower for 
people who are in the region, for whom it is far less expensive to bring 
in, and for whom it is their regional FUDCon, the bar needs to be 
significantly higher for people who are requesting sponsorship from out 
of the region.  I'm not sure that having a "sponsor" sticking up for you 
solves that problem - I think it simply adds to the process, and could 
even be a breaking point where people who wanted to go were forgotten 
about by their sponsor, etc.
> Regards,
> Pierre
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