Hi, instead of turning DebConf13 into a travel agency which will have to manage requests, demands and complaints (even more than we already have to deal with every year) and giving richer people an opportunity to buy their beds of choice and forcing poorer people into left-over beds, I suggest a completly different protocol: Do a lottery. announce it as a lottery and do such. Maybe we could give everybody 5 tickets (for free if sponsored) and allow them to buy more tickets for say, 50 CHF per ticket. (And a ticket could just mean drawing a random number between 1 and 1000.) For registration, everybody ranks their choices of bed/room, incl. the option "I'd rather not come then sleep in this". And then we draw numbers per tickets, add those per person and the highest number wins (the first choice of bed/room), the 2nd highest wins the 2nd choice, etc, down until the last choice. This is a bit unpredicatble, but it's also fair(er) and rather predictable that its unpredicatable too. And of course, everybody can still swap on indidivual bases as usual. I'm sorry to not have come up with a more solid proposal about this yet, but I think its a good start and definitly better then making an already quite- money-centric debconf even more money-centric. We are divided by money all the time, and even more, while doing DebConf in Switzerland. The pricing-room- proposal will widen this gap even more, while this lottery proposal aims at lessing this gap a little bit at least. cheers, Holger p.s.: and in this model, also coorporate could mean 10 tickets "for free" and professional 15 tickets "for free". and then they can buy more tickets to improve their chances. this way we can nicely make clear that people should not expect debconf-team to be a travelagency
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