15 Oct
2025
15 Oct
'25
3:24 p.m.
Hello everyone,
this is coming late, but first of all, many thanks to Daniel for reaching out on this
topic early and elaborating!
On your four initial questions:
* I very admire everything, even if that's a luxury choice - because this event and
you all deserves it.
Though, I was not happy with the amount of money we spent vs. our actual total budget at
XSF (unfortunately).
Not ignoring that we had generous sponsors, but still it used to be a lot.
* No, unfortunately, I have not contacts. But may in Hamburg my employer could sponsor a
place.
* To answer the question of the daily well, I we can also crawl for potential agenda
topics and see how much we fill
a day and if the agenda is worth it or we could have a well organised online follow-up
(happy to help). But I admire
goffis suggestion much more spending time working or being together. It's valuable
time in my view.
** What could also happen is that we reduce interest to travel to Brussels for just one
day. Less people make the event maybe also less worth / more expensive.
* First of all, I think this is correct on the limited XSF budget and effort in the recent
years.
(And being member of the Board mostly in this time I also take responsibilty here and this
one reason why I won't apply
again for Board the next phase.) Still, I don't think raising a fee is the answer. To
be honest and expanding the perspective as Syndace (in chat said): We
don't need to meet (always and by hard) in Brussels; there are cheaper options for
sure.
Just out of traditions and failure to address the situation that would lead now to charge
people is not a positive development in my view.
That siutation would rather question to me:
** How is our sponsor engagement sufficient?
** Is this the right time and place?
** Where else could we maybe even have a better venue?
** If we find better can cheaper places, can we have more physical meetings?
** Do we need to be in Brussels by hard until we solve the financial situation, we should
go for less expensive places / cities?
Are we even sure at least 50% of the participants would be okay to pay a 250 / 150 EUR
fee? That would be 10-15 people according to the last years participation, right?
How many people would consider not even to pay 50€?
And yes to Peter & Matt (in the SCAM chat), sponsoring is something that needs to be
continued as we did for 2025. Hence, more in the
bank would make the discussion less pressing.
(Note: Also many thanks to Alex, Daniel, Matt for also sponsoring dinner and with their
time organising (please correct me if I am mistaken).)
In general, one may be interested in the disussion in the SCAM chat: scam(a)muc.xmpp.org
Thanks all,
Eddie
On 11/10/2025 00:47, Dave Cridland <dave(a)cridland.net> wrote:
On Tue, 30 Sept 2025 at 11:14, Daniel Gultsch
<daniel(a)gultsch.de> wrote:
• How did you like the format of the last three
summits? (Renting a
conference room in a hotel with lunch provided (in buffet style) by
the hotel)
Sadly I only made it to the last one, and it was good - but I'd have been
fine without the fancy lunch, to be honest.
The lunchtime *company* was great, though, as always!
• Do you have a concrete lead for some company or
organization that
could provide us with a conference room for free in the city of
Brussels? I’m not asking for vague suggestions like "maybe someone
could try to reach out to xyz" I’m asking if you personally know
someone who has a key to a room.
As you know, I'm working on various options, paid and otherwise.
• Do we want a 1 day or 2 day summit? Last year
the 'official' part of
the summit was over after 1.2 days and had we known this we could have
probably managed to squeeze it all into one day.
I'd like to stick with 2 days if we can.
• 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.)
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.
I'm entirely unconvinced that the Summit offers €250 worth of value to most
people.
I also think the value increases the more people who are there (at least to
me), and this especially includes relative newcomers and others who may
well not be able to justify a €250 fee, even if they can afford it easily.
(To be clear, the more people who are there /and also feel empowered and
encouraged to speak up/!)
If people cease to be able to come for free, then I firmly believe it
lowers the value for all of us.
Dave.