30 Sep
2025
30 Sep
'25
10:01 a.m.
Hi Daniel,
First, thank you for all your work on previous summits, and for starting
this thread early so that we can plan ahead.
Second, I will reply below with my XSF Treasurer hat on.
On 9/30/25 4:14 AM, Daniel Gultsch wrote:
• If we do a repeat of the last two (three) years
(which i feel is
somewhat likely due to how difficult it is to find places that would
have us for free and because I’m under the impression that people like
the "fancy environment" with the snacks and the fancy bottles of
water) I feel somewhat strongly that we should switch to a model in
which every participant pays for their own seat (at per cost) and add
a fairly generous fee-waiver on top of it.
I’m very much in favor of keeping the Summit accessible.
(Socio)economicly speaking our community is very diverse. We have
people in our community who would not be able to come if they had to
pay the ~250 Euro the hotel charges us per person. But we also have
people in our community to whom this is a rounding error in the
overall travel+accommodation cost. (I have personally been on both
sides of this.)
Another approach would be "pay what you can". I don't know the situation
on the ground because I haven't attended a summit in many years, but if
attendees know what the cost is then they might be willing to pay their
share, with the XSF picking up the expense for those who can't afford to
do so.
I agree with Goffi that unfortunately this could put some attendees in
an awkward position, but we could perhaps mitigate that somehow (e.g.,
assign a trusted third party for communicating about these matters).
The XSF notoriously doesn’t have a lot of money and
efforts to change
this over the last 3 years haven’t been very successful. Switching to
a fee waiver model would allow board (or whoever) to set aside a fixed
amount and send x (where x=10 for example) applicants to the summit
for free.
The XSF did much better financially in 2025 because we directly asked
companies to become or remain sponsors, which several companies very
generously did. [1] If we can sustain this level of contributions, then
the summit should be affordable for us, especially if we can find a less
"fancy" meeting location, as you say.
Peter
[1] Many thanks to, in alphabetical order, Erlang Solutions, ProcessOne,
Tigase, and Tygrys for their sponsorship, and to Isode for their
significant sponsorship of the 2025 summit!