[AusNOG] AusNOG-02

[Simon Lyall]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008, James Spenceley wrote:
> Anyway, I'd love to hear some feedback, is $600 too much ? Is anyone
> not coming because of the price hike ?

I guess $600 is more than most people can casually pay themselves or more 
than most managers can simply authorise. $200 on the other hand is 
low enough to get away with without much paperwork or pain. I can imagine 
somebody local just asking for two days off (perhaps paid) to attend the 
conference and paying the entrance themselves.

The $2000/day conferences on the other hand *are* out of training budgets 
and I suspect almost nobody will pay for themselves.

A $200 conference:

- Will need at least 3 man-months worth of volunteers ( as in 3*30*8 hours)
- Will not be in a nice hotel
- Will not have nice waiters filling up your water every 10 minutes
- Network connections might be ad-hoc
- Will still need serious sponsors and something to underwrite costs.
- Might have to be during a holiday break to get a cheap venue
- Won't be able to fly in many speakers
- Won't have a professional conference organiser smoothing out problems.
- Might not have nice sit down dinners
- Snacks during conference probably not that great.
- Might have a cheap looking website
- Might have cheap ($50/night) accommodation options

If you pay $600 you can have a nice venue, fly in a few speakers, somebody 
will organise the catering, rooms and other boring stuff and you'll have a 
surplus for the next time around.

> Do people see value in AusNOG
> getting to a position of financial independence ?

This is really required. Having a few thousand ( well at least $10k) in 
the kitty means that bookings etc can be made and other problems smoothed 
over. NZNOG [1] is kind of in this position after a few years in that 
there is a small surplus passed on from one year to the next and at least 
one sponsor that sponsors every year.

[1] - NZNOG 09 will probably be in the $200-$250 range and within a $400
       flight of Syd/Mel.

-- 
Simon Lyall  |  Very Busy  |  Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.