[wsfii-discuss] fantasy budget for an open geodata track / workshop

Mon Jun 27 11:22:29 UTC 2005

On Sun, Jun 26, 2005 at 10:55:12PM +0100, Saul Albert wrote:
> buying 3 meals and 4 litres of caffinated drinks every day, £20 is
> starvation wages. 

Right, this is assuming we would be offering one meal + some
sustenance during the day. i know £20 doesn't get you very far in
London, but much more than that and it starts to look like actual
risible remuneration rather than a per-diem token... more below 

> The question, more precisely, is who should we pay to come?
> Who can resource themselves? Who is most hard-up?

Why should we be carrying out means assessment before even making
offers? I would like to be able to make a standard minimum offer which
people who had the means to do so would find it easy to reject, and
get some kind of 'karmatic' return for that gesture. 

> It seems to me that non-uk people, particularly people from places with
> shit economies are most likely to need support, and students, and people
> who are just skint because they spent all their highly employable time
> writing free software. Since none of the organisers are being paid, and
> the whole thing is one big voluntary effort, asking employed, relatively
> solvent uk people to pay their own way is fine in my book... people
> aren't expecting to be paid to present at what-the-hack or open-tech...

I vacillate here between agreeing that this is a good idea in
principle, and thinking that this reinforces the economies of cultural
exploitation; anyone we did invite would be there because they have
put a lot of there personal time and energy into the creation of free
mapmaking software. 

But nor would i want to create artificial divides between the
remunerated and non-remunerated. On these grounds possibly a
grassroots conference offering an honorarium however token is not the
best idea, and it's not one that i'm prepared to fight for, other
than, "it's a nice gesture that states, we recognise that offering
flights-only expenses actually puts you to a lot of trouble in terms
of externalities."

The WSFII context does seem an appropriate one to try and do something
which we could fundraise equitably for and which there is support for,
that's why i'd find it worth dreaming up the 'best case'

> Who, in your dream gis track, would be there, and which of those can't
> resource their own attendance (accommodation, and meals, of course, we
> will try to take care of). 

Here's a shortlist of people i would really really like to invite and
who i don't think are fully able or willing to resource themselves.
What can i do with this list as a putative track organiser? 
What will you do with it?

Frank Warmerdam (CA) 
Chris Holmes (US but currently in Zambia doing spatial infrastructure)
Amaury Jacquot (FR)
Petter Reinholdsen (NO)
Nick Whitelegg (UK)
Richard Fairhurst (UK)

The first two would be great-to-have if they could make it and we
could afford it. The next batch are all openstreetmap-related hackers
to all of whom i would at least like to offer support and i think the
non-UK people (w|c)ould not make it if we could not offer support of
some kind for travel expenses.

> Previous years of free network meetings have been almost entirely
> peer-resourced (well, I never got paid to go!)
> I don't see why we should professionalise it this year. Or am I missing

I don't see what you mean by professionalise. 
- In terms of looking to small open source companies to provide
  co-funding?
- In terms of remunerating people for non-expenses in any way?
- In terms of offering any financial support for travel at all?

Where does it break down in between? I'm just uncomfortable with the
means-testing thing. I know that people have been subsidised to attend
previous freenetworks conferences. Last year Schuyler and i were
exactly in that fall-through-the-gaps position where we were too poor
to fund ourselves to attend, but not without-future-means enough to
justify *asking* for support, so we didn't go, and regretted it long
after.

I will happily drop the honorarium idea from future proposals if it's
this particularly that is sticking on your conscience. I threw the
budget out to get a sense of what is viable and what not, in the
context of WSFII; ideally, if i am in a position to bring interesting
activities to it and not have to draw on WSFII funding in order to do
that - e.g. by getting a bit of support from mapbender or ERmapper -
then i want to be able to do that.

I haven't seen much discussion on this list. What i have heard gives me
the impression that WSFII (or the WSFII prepcon) is just the
freenetworks conference, and that other activities which connect to
the edges are, by nature, marginalised.   

I don't mean this to come across as bitching; i planned to set aside
September in order to work fulltime on wsfii meta-organising and
logistics if needed. Sofa network, peer support, yes, but the
core WSFII activities are far from 'marginal' culturally and we lose
by insisting on presenting them that way.

-jo