These people previously asked Dessalines and me to participate in one of their conferences, and expected us to pay the full ticket price. I think its really outrageous to charge so much money for setting up some video calls, considering that most people who run the Fediverse don’t get any money at all. There are also no recordings published afterwards, which goes completely against the spirit of openness of the Fediverse.
The most egregious for me is that these are not publicly streamed nor recorded. Only the demos are recorded, which are worthless to me.
Sounds extremely exclusive. One year during COVID, FOSDEM used a public matrix server for their entire conference and it went really well. No mandatory registration fees were required, anybody could access, there were recordings, presenters could send in a pre-recorded video or present live, and the presenters were available in the main chatroom then in a separate (but public) one after the their presentations.
When I see what FOSDEM did and then this that doesn’t even do half of that, there’s no way I’m donating money.
From the title, I had a question and found the answer in the FAQ:
What’s an unconference?
An unconference is a conference in which the participants – rather than the organizers – decide which sessions happen each day and on which topics. In the many years we have been organizing unconferences, we have found that for complex subjects like the Fediverse, attendees get more value (and fun!) out of unconferences than from traditional conferences. Sounds disorganized? It did to us, too, until we actually experienced our first one. So don’t worry, it will be fine :-)
Organizing conferences costs time and money, like many other things in the Fediverse. We believe the sooner the Fediverse finds a way to pay for itself that doesn’t depend on the heroic efforts of a small number of individuals, the better. We want to build something that is sustainable, and to do that, it needs to know how to pay for itself.
It aligns the objectives between organizers and attendees, and keeps us organizers focused on what you want out of the conference; as opposed to us pushing an agenda, or letting a sponsor undule influence the agenda.
In our long experience organizing conferences we have learned that people who pay for an event are much more likely to actually attend. Free-of-charge conferences often have more no-show’s then actual attendees.
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