On Fri, 2020-03-06 at 08:05 -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote: [...] > 2. Charge attendees $300 for a 3-day conference. This seems to be > the going rate (eg BSDCan, PGCon). This allows the conference to be > self-funding without sponsors, and any sponsorship can go towards > evening events, food, travel bursaries, etc. Can I just inject a dose of reality here: The most costly thing is Venue rental (which comes with a F&B minimum) and the continuous Tea and Coffee. Last year for Plumbers, the venue cost us $37k and the breaks $132k (including a lunch buffet, which was a requirement of the venue rental). Given we had 500 attendees, that, alone is $340 per head already. Now we could cut out the continuous tea and coffee ... and the espresso machines you all raved about last year cost us about $7 per shot. But it's not just this, it's also AV (microphones and projectors) and recording, and fast internet access. That all came to about $100k last year (or an extra $200 per head). So you can see, running at the level Plumbers does you're already looking at $540 a head, which, co-incidentally is close to our attendee fee. To get to $300 per head, you lot will have to give up something in addition to the espresso machines, what is it to be? James
