On 05.02.2020 12:01, Judit Foglszinger wrote:
And note also: professional fee is usually around the "covering own costs", and we have many attendees which are not sponsored but also not "professional or corporate", so they are still a cost for DebConf organization.Out of curiosity - Are those just calculative or would debconf actually have less expenses if one person less would attend?
It is difficult to say.About marginal costs: Less bags, t-shirts, conf-dinner, day-trip, so less costs. And we required (sometime) reconfirmation, just for such short term costs (and also for the sponsored costs, which I ignore here).
If we have 50 attendees less, we could hire smaller rooms, one less hackroom, so also less routers. But if we have just one attendee less, I do not think it matter much for infrastructure. So it would be most "calculative" (total cost divided by attendees). But attendees which register at Professional and Corporate level (especially early registrations, before having many sponsors) really help. 10 "Professionals" are like a large sponsor.
But: we organize(d) DebConf not to be economically efficient, but to have give a great value to Debian: talks, face-to-face meetings, motivation, but also the social part is very important: when we know a person we tend to behave better online (not enough to block flames, but I think it helps a lot to reduce them).
ciao cate