The following has been posted to [pox]. Please see the respective thread.

The trend was to try these options:


Introduction

There are three main categories for which we need to spend money:

  • Travel costs
  • Accomodation costs
  • Additional costs

Also we need to consider possible income from other sources than sponsors.

Travel costs

Based on past experience I made an estimate on the distribution of speakers:

From UK 10
From Europe 15
From USA 6
From expensive countries 5
Total 36

The total number is the number of slots we decided on some time ago. Based on this and some more or less reasonable travelling costs travelling costs are by far the biggest item. Thus travel costs are the item where we can save most. Fortunately we chose Manchester which is the destination of many cheap airlines.

I see the following options for savings here:

  1. Invite less speakers - travel

    That would mean we have less slots and less contributions. This would probably the biggest loss for the conference but also the one which saves most.

    On the other hand as of now the deadline for submitting contributions is not yet over. We may have less interesting contributions than expected anyway so this could be an "automatic" option.

  2. Invite "cheaper" speakers

    Though flight prices are rather cheap nowadays flight prices differ much depending from where you fly. Especially flights from poor countries are still rather expensive.

    So one option to save money would be to invite less speakers from countries where flights are expensive.

  3. Ask speakers for financial help - travel

    This means that we ask the speakers to cover their costs partly of fully. IMHO this should be done in any case if we have not enough money.

Accomodation costs

Accomodation costs are the second larges item so we can save some money here also.

I see the following options for savings here:

  1. Invite less speakers - accommodation

    See 1. for a discussion.

  2. Get cheaper accomodation

    At the moment the budget contains normal hotel prices in Manchester. This is something we can save on for example by booking rooms in the local youth hostel (I think http://www.yha.org.uk/find-accommodation/north-west-cities/hostels/manchester/index.aspx is the relevant link here). This could save 3/4 of accomodation costs. Also private accomodation could be an option if we manage to organize this.

  3. Shorten conference

    If we do a two-day conference instead of three days we need to pay for one night instead of two. This would half the accomodation costs.

    If we invite less speakers shortening the conference would be an obvious option.

  4. Ask speakers for financial help - accomodation

    See 3. for a discussion.

  5. Offer mass accomodation to speakers

    If we have cheap mass accomodation: From the past I know that some speakers are not so picky with accomodation so there is a good chance that there will be some acceptance.

  6. Ask speakers to share a room

    If double rooms are cheaper: This could be an option though savings are low and inconvenience for speakers are high.

Additional costs

At the moment it's a bit hard to have hard numbers here. We probably need to pay the porter but other costs are not clear yet. In any case I expect additional costs to be low compared to other costs. Thus the potential to save money here is also low and I can not suggest possible savings.

Income

  1. Participant fee

    Of course we have the option to require some fee from the participants. This needs to be and should be done by asking for donations of course. At the moment I'm thinking of an amount of 20EUR for the whole conference.

  2. Donations from Oekonux / P2P Foundation participants

    Another option would be to ask Oekonux / P2P Foundation participants for donations. In case we do not have enough money from sponsors this should be done in any case.

Oekonux/Project/Conferences/4thConference/PossibleSavings (last edited 2008-11-06 22:10:12 by StefanMerten)

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