On Wednesday, June 03, 2015 08:51:50 AM Robert Schweikert wrote:
On 06/03/2015 01:42 AM, Michal Kubecek wrote:
On Tuesday 02 of June 2015 09:12:28 Robert Schweikert wrote:
As Henne points out, the board election is probably the component where the inactivity is the most glaring. ... The same problem manifests itself for oSC. If we have 500 members and we cannot motivate at least 1/2 of the membership to get their butts off the couch and show up at oSC what does that mean? Maybe it means that the membership number is inflated and of the 500 that are "members" only 100 or so really care and of those 100 we get 50 showing up at oSC. Then we have 50% of members who care show up and that's not a bad number. Problem is we do not know.
I don't think it's the same problem. When it comes to elections, you can surely talk about taking one's butt off the couch (figuratively, of course, as to vote, one doesn't actually need to take it off) but visiting a conference is something completely different. The travel and accomodation expenses might seem negligible to you but not everyone feels the same way (and it's (by far) not only matter of perception).
Yes, travel expenses need to be taken into consideration. However, the TSP is there to help. While I do not have the hard numbers handy, my gut feel tells me that we do not get overwhelmed by TSP applications and in the end we have money left over.
In the end, everyone has to decide whether their presence at the conference is worth the price. And I find nothing surprising or disturbing in it if many (or even most) of them - including active
members of the community - decide that their answer is negative.
Fair enough, that of course raises the question if we should continue with oSC. Considering that it is a lot of effort for volunteers to pull the conference together. If members and contributors cannot be bothered to show up to our own conference then maybe we should not undertake the endeavour past oSC16.
Later, Robert
TSP is actually a great program, that i used to attend oSC14, but due to the way it works, it wasn't useful to me to attend this year, even though I was approved.