Ticket Prices

Kia ora koutou

New thread here for the communities / self-organising discussion https://www.loomio.org/d/Flm5YKqz @falcondot , @gregorycassel , anyone else !

Thanks to @silviazuur and @anthonycabraal and everyone else for your comments. Glad my sqeaky wheel produced some thoughtful discussions. I wasn't able to make it to Welly for personal reasons, but I'd like to reply a couple of things anyway.

@danmilward said:

Cheap doesn't = quality or lead to longevity

Sure, but expensive doesn't necessarily serve either of those values either. Expensive consumer products are usually designed to crap out within 1-2 years, just like cheap ones. The main difference is the disposable income of the demographic they are marketed at. Both open source development and crowdfunding prove that you can get investment in the form of many small contributions as easily - or more easily for groundbreaking work - as you can in the form of a small number of large contributions.

In a world where a tiny minority have most of the money, the simplest and most tempting business model is selling to a small number of rich customers at a price only they can afford. But surely the whole point of social enterprise, and applying open source values to fields outside software, is that although it's more challenging to serve a larger audience who can afford to spend less, it's also ethical and necessary.

@daniellewis

Though there is a relationship between accessibility and price, I think it can be solved in other ways. ie scholarships and sponsorship.

Possibly, but my point is to think about how inviting the whole thing is to someone outside the free/ libre/ open/ tech/ start-up culture. You know, the people who could actually have their minds blown (in a good way) by attending something like OS//OS. People who intuitively grasp that there are social and technological possibilities beyond the old 20th century debates of state vs. market and capitalism vs. communism, but are struggling to find ways to articulate those possibilities. Such people, if they are unwaged, will look at that ticket price and say "oh, I guess this isn't really meant for people like me".

Scholarships and sponsorships could work, but only if they are prominently linked to the ticket page, and/or the home page from which you find the ticket page. Other things that improve accessibility for people on low incomes include assistance with travel equalization/ facilitated ride-sharing, accommodation (billeting/ couchsurfing through a platform like BeWelcome.org), and as others have mentioned, providing childcare.

My other point is that although conferences are great for getting a large group of people to focus intensively on a certain kaupapa for a fixed period of time, they are not sustainable unless and until we come up with a way of moving passengers between cities and countries using renewable energy. With that in mind, in makes sense to support remote participation at least as much as in-person attendance, and deeply integrate online participation so that it comes as close as possible to being there. Maybe we could create simultaneous in-person gatherings in multiple cities connected by digital networks to make one meta-conference.

There are lots of creative possibilities to be explored in terms of both affordability of physical attendance, and support for full participation of digital attendees.

Lower Price would be nice. Kiwicon costs 80/30 dollars. Ability to volunteer for the event would be great - I offered but heard basically nothing back. Hire NextDayVideo (http://nextdayvideo.com/) for AV and get Volunteers on AV.