[Conferences] Sponsors and delegate contact info

[Giovanni Bajo]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:10:34 -0400 (EST), Douglas Napoleone
<doug.napoleone at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Noufal Ibrahim<noufal at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>   I hope this mail finds you all in good health and spirits.
>>
>>   I haven't sent any mails to this list before so I'll start by
>> saying that my name is Noufal Ibrahim and I'm heading the organisation
>> of the first Indian Pycon scheduled to take place at the end of
>> September 2009.
>>
>>   We're looking for corporate sponsors ie. companies in the country
>> that are into Python and who we can make part of the local Python
>> community. We have a couple of people who are interested and we're
>> following up.
>>
>>   One of the things that a potential sponsor asked for is the list of
>> delegates along with their contact information (email addresses). We
>> never anticipated this and didn't put up a privacy policy on our site
>> when we first launched. The support of this sponsor would go a long
>> way in covering our costs and actually making the conference a
>> success. They promise that they won't spam people. I presume that
>> they're going to use it for their recruiting.   I'm in a bit of
>> dilemma whether to accept or not.
> We have often gotten this request from corporate sponsors and even some
> people who claimed to be a sponsor but were not. We have never given out
> this information to sponsors. We do have on our registration form an
opt-in
> for receiving e-mails from the PSF/Organizers, but this does not include
> sponsors.

Same here in Italy. We have opt-in for e-mails about Python Italia
Association, but not for sponsors. The rationale (based on our own
perception) is that most people attending PyCons really hate advertistments
and specifically advertisment via e-mail, so it would be a mistake to even
allow this as an opt-in. It is true that, in business conferences, sponsors
usually obtain a list of attendees, but my opinion is that this applies
only to non-technical conferences, or at least non-highly-technical
conferenes (or better: non-geek conferences :)).

This notwithstanding, it once happened that one sponsor, not satisfied by
our refusal to provide him with a list of e-mail, managed to come up with a
list and send spam: he basically spent not sure how many hours googling
around e-mail addresses of people that (he thought) joined the conference,
using blog posts, newsgroups, etc. as reference; eg: if he could find an
e-mail of a person that once said in a IRC transcript "yes, I'll be at
PyCon Italy this year", he would put it into the list. He also used the
official list of speakers, of course. What happened is that a few people
contacted us in anger saying that we did not have the right to give out
their e-mail address -- which was true, in fact, we hadn't :)
-- 
Giovanni Bajo
Develer S.r.l.
http://www.develer.com