[PD] Thoughts in conclusion of the 4th Pure Data Convention

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at at.or.at
Sat Feb 11 20:52:02 CET 2012


On Feb 11, 2012, at 1:01 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> Le 2012-02-08 à 04:50:00, Max a écrit :
> 
>> FUNDING: Getting the necessary funding was certainly the issue I personally spent the most time on. We had an overall budget of around 17.000 EUR. [...] That budget is less than a third of what the convention in Montréal had available.
> 
> It's easy to spend a lot less money when not funding the participants' travel. I mean that for a fair comparison, your non-travel budget of 2011 should be compared to the non-travel budget of 2007.
> 
> The 2007 convention had a very large number of overseas participants and paid 350 EUR of plane ticket fees for _each_ participant who wasn't already funded by other means.
> 
> Despite that, IIRC, the total cost was a lot less than the 1st Convention, but I don't have actual numbers to show for comparison.
> 
>> EXPENSES:  We spent most of the budget supporting our participants. The biggest expense there was covering for the accomodation,
> 
> In the 2nd convention, there was almost no budget for accomodation. Hôtel was paid for just one person, and everybody else got free accomodation sharing apartments with volunteers. This made the cost of accomodation something about 2 % of the total cost of the convention (but I don't have actual figures).
> 
>> Frankly I've been a bit surprised that the average age wasn't a bit lower. This certainly has implications on how to accommodate the guests in the future (youth hostel, again?),
> 
> I don't know how comfortable those hostels are, but access to actual homes for 0,- EUR is hard to beat.

Staying in people's apartments in Montreal was nice, but that only works if there are enough volunteers to manage that whole process.  I also enjoyed the arrangement in Sao Paolo, where we had the whole hostel housing only pdcon attendees.  That took more money, but probably less work on the part of the pdcon organizers.

.hc


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