Re: On future conferences

[Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net>]

On Thursday 28 September 2006 12:09, Chris Browne wrote:
> ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca (Andrew Sullivan) writes:
> > On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 04:10:05PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >> Well it is my understanding that the travel sponsorships made up about
> >> 50% of the entire conference budget
> >
> > Not quite 50, and I think the higher amount included accommodation.
> > Josh Berkus has all the final numbers, though.  Those numbers should
> > be available as part of the SPI accounting, I assume.
>
> To avoid wasting too much time on struggling for numbers that may not
> be as interesting as imagined, the figure I was thinking about as
> being the *truly* interesting one is the total amount spent by
> everyone on travel.
>
> For my part, that would have been about $5 in subway tokens, and a few
> dollars worth of gasoline.  For those travelling from afar, it may
> have been thousands of dollars apiece.  In some cases, there may not
> be a meaningful figure to be had; Gavin, for instance, originates in
> Australia, but had already travelled to the US, so that the trip to
> Toronto was just a "hop".  I honestly don't know whether his figure
> ought to be $500 or $5000...
>

I would speculate that the typical airfare cost for someone in the US 
traveling to YYZ would be around $500, based on that being what I paid for my 
flight out of Tampa.  It would have been more if I had left from Gainesville, 
but probably cheaper for others who might have been able to pick up a direct 
flight.  That said the cost to fly from Florida to Portland also tends to be 
around $500, assuming you do enough bargain hunting for a good fare. 

> At any rate, we can really only speculate as to what the TOTAL travel
> spending was, as nobody was expected to report that.
>
> But that *total* does represent a legitimate view on what had to be
> spent on the conference, and the shape of the equivalent "total travel
> cost" would be entirely different for a set of regional conferences.
>
> Whether we can measure it or not, it's still relevant, as it
> represents amounts that people have to commit to in order for
> conferences to be attended.

Part of the issue might be how big you consider the regions to be.  IMO if you 
do one in NYC or Philidelphia, people from Georgia/Florida/Alabama will not 
see that as being in there region. If you do it in Atlanta, I'm not sure if 
you even get enough people to go (the south east doesn't seem to be a hotbed 
of postgresql activity).  It might work in someplace like Atlanta since it is 
a major hub, so maybe you can get airfare under $100 which should be doable. 
(Though don't forget hotel).

Don't forget though, there are numerous conferences built around different 
models for people to check out (yapc, php|works,oscon) if you're interested 
to see how the packages tend to look. 

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL