One of the surprisingly nice thing about #emf2024 is that there's no special treatment of speakers other than being guaranteed a ticket - no special badge, no special areas, no special dinners. It's just one big community where speaking is just one of the ways to contribute, and all the others are just as important.
@mjg59 Dunno, for #PostgreSQL conferences we get asked for a quiet speaker room (which really is open for everyone, but mostly used by speakers to prepare).
Badges differentiate between Staff, Speaker and Attendee - which helps finding speakers. It's not a large difference, but it helps.
Our conferences also don't make a profit, but they break even. Otherwise it's not sustainable. And after all, conference is not going to happen without talks and speakers.
Did I mention that it would be really nice to have #PostgreSQL as an embeddable library similar to #SQLite? Size wise that should be fine, I think the whole PG daemon is just ~5MB.
I know that the architecture doesn't lean to it, but someone has to do this eventually! 🙂