[Inpycon] Everybody Pays Policy

[Kiran Jonnalagadda]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:32 AM, atul jha <koolhead17 at gmail.com> wrote:

> An event with focus on Indian crowd should be handled in Indian way.
>

I actually think PyCon charging everyone including speakers is a good idea.
We're mixing up multiple concerns here, so let me try to separate them:

*1. The notion that students need subsidy because they can't afford
commercial rates.*

Any conference the size of PyCon India charging < Rs 2000 per day is not at
a commercial rate. It's not even at a sustainable rate. For comparison,
here are some commercially priced events:

Agile India 2014: Rs 10,000 *per day*
http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014

UX India 2013: Rs 10,000
http://2013.ux-india.org/pricedetails

JSConf Asia in Manila: PHP 19,500, SGD 560, ~INR 28,000
http://2013.jsconf.asia/
The Phillippine peso used to be 1:1 with the Indian rupee until a couple
years ago and the purchasing power parity is the same, so it's the
equivalent of spending 28k on a ticket in India.

With prices like these, subsidies make sense. PyCon India tickets sold at
Rs 800 and complaining about that is honestly shameful. Nobody who has the
time and inclination to attend PyCon India is so poor they can't afford Rs
800 on a ticket. None of these people will complain that the restaurant
they had lunch at did not sponsor it.

*2. Speakers and crew are paying with their time and effort, so taking
their cash is charging them extra.*

This is a valid point, but a double edged sword. When you give someone free
entry and a speaker badge, you mark them as special and above the crowd.
The speaker-audience divide encourages formality, where speakers are
announced in advance, their names and talk blurbs are used to sell tickets,
and schedules are fixed and adhered to.

What you lose is spontaneity. You can't have an open session where anyone
may speak up because the audience will see it as a gap in the schedule, not
an opportunity for them to step up and speak (unless it's a single track
event and there is nowhere else to go for that period).

You can't fix this by selecting flash talks in advance because those
speakers will expect free tickets too, and free tickets are not free for
the organizers. The per-head costs still have to be paid for.

Spontaneity is good for a community. Class divisions are not.

*3. PyCon has sponsor money anyway, so why should individuals pay?*

First of all, all money isn't the same. Sponsor money is not a donation.
Sponsors expect their pound of flesh. If you want to see what a
sponsor-paid event looks like, look at Directi's HTTPX conference:

http://bigrockhttpx.net/
http://bigrockhttpx.net/mumbai
http://bigrockhttpx.net/delhi

These events were free for attendees, but it's incredibly hard to tell
which session is led by an independent community member and which by a
sponsor representative. For what's labeled as a "definite event", is there
anything on the schedule that looks like someone who's pushing the
boundaries and is there to reveal their work to the world? (Not dissing
Directi, it is their first attempt and they'll no doubt improve with each
iteration.)

PyCon has an independent voice because it doesn't have to worry about
sponsor expectations (one of: recruitment, selling their product, or
finding new clients). When you give up participant money and become
dependent on sponsor money, you also make the transition from serving
participants to instead selling participants to sponsors -- and nobody is
interested in students who have neither money nor well developed skills, so
a sponsor-subsidised student-friendly event is actually self-defeating.

PyCon's independence depends on people paying for their tickets. There is
no way around this.

Second, there is sponsor money coming in anyway, from sponsors who manage
to benefit without demanding too much. IMHO, this money should not be spent
on PyCon itself. It should be directed towards supporting the growth of the
Python community *beyond* PyCon.

*4. Management overheads.*

The more twists you add to the story, the more overhead you'll have in
explaining this to people. Is your ticket free or not? If you buy a ticket
and your talk is selected, will your ticket be refunded or not? If you
didn't buy a ticket and didn't get selected, can you get a discount code to
buy at the early bird price since you proposed to speak back then? What if
you spoke in an open session? Do you get a refund? Carrying cash is
difficult, can you pay by card at the venue? Can PyCon also cover your
travel and stay since you are a poor student?

Answering questions is a full-time job, sometimes even requiring two
people. Simple rules go a long way towards eliminating such hidden costs.

My 2b.

Kiran

-- 
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://jace.zaiki.in
http://hasgeek.com
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