Re: On future conferences

ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca (Andrew Sullivan) writes:
> On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 04:10:05PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> Well it is my understanding that the travel sponsorships made up about
>> 50% of the entire conference budget
>
> Not quite 50, and I think the higher amount included accommodation.
> Josh Berkus has all the final numbers, though. Those numbers should
> be available as part of the SPI accounting, I assume.

To avoid wasting too much time on struggling for numbers that may not
be as interesting as imagined, the figure I was thinking about as
being the *truly* interesting one is the total amount spent by
everyone on travel.

For my part, that would have been about $5 in subway tokens, and a few
dollars worth of gasoline. For those travelling from afar, it may
have been thousands of dollars apiece. In some cases, there may not
be a meaningful figure to be had; Gavin, for instance, originates in
Australia, but had already travelled to the US, so that the trip to
Toronto was just a "hop". I honestly don't know whether his figure
ought to be $500 or $5000...

At any rate, we can really only speculate as to what the TOTAL travel
spending was, as nobody was expected to report that.

But that *total* does represent a legitimate view on what had to be
spent on the conference, and the shape of the equivalent "total travel
cost" would be entirely different for a set of regional conferences.

Whether we can measure it or not, it's still relevant, as it
represents amounts that people have to commit to in order for
conferences to be attended.
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