[wsfii-discuss] tracks and travel

[Jo Walsh]

hello fellow wsfii-discussers,

i've been mulling over the streams or tracks and the connections
between them. i like the very comprehensive list now at 

http://okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/WsfiiProposedStreams

There's a UK bias to a lot of the names mentioned there, though. I'd
enjoy this potential opportunity to bring euro-hackers in particular
subejct areas together. for example the
mysociety/theyworkforyou/publicwhip crowd doing democratic analysis /
information services; it would be great to connect with people doing
related work in places like holland, denmark, belgium.

Saul can speak for the budget, i'd suggest we have a per-track
allocation and tracks which don't want to take up a whole available
travel budget of a grand or two grand or what have you, put it back
into a public pool which other tracks can ask for. i would prefer to
offer some finacial support to a lot of people rather than offer full
expenses to a few people. and we should have a sofa network.

I'm meant to be working on some resource-exchange-management software
to help run this media arts season that saul is also involved
organising. Our friend hugh's just released a quite
flourishing-featured online LETS -
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite/

i think we could consider running a wsfii currency into which we could
convert peoples' budget, and attendees could convert their 10-15 euro
nuisance / booking fee into this currency, and the tools could help
manage the transparent allocation of finances. (how exactly we would
manage the conversion back into europounds and payment transactions i
am not sure; perhaps this is overkill, but could be fun.


-jo