tytso <
tytso@mit.edu> writes:
This is a pretty well-explored problem space. There are a number of organizations that help academic or FOSS organizations run conferences. Examples of these include Usenix (which used to be the organization that
ran the Linux Kernel Maintainer's Summit), The Linux Foundation (which
now runs the Maintainer's Summit as well as Linux Plumbers Conference),
and Association Headquarters (which is a for-profit company that helps non-profits run conferences as well as being their "legal entity", ala
SPI). These organizations don't need to be homed in the country where
the conference takes place. The Linux Foundation is based in the US,
but has run (or will be running) conferences in Canada, Korea, Japan,
China, Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic, etc.
These organizations all employ profession event/conference planners, and
can handle signing legal contracts with hotels, caterers, restaurants,
etc., thus shielding the techies from legal liability, as well as
generally being able to do a much better job at running a conference
compared to techie who tries to pretend to be an event planner on the
side. The tradeoff is that while the conferences do tend to be more polished, having professional, paid staff is expensive. And so
typically, to go down this path, the conferences need to hit up
corporate sponsors to help pay for the event.
Using one of these professional organizations is going to significantly change the characgter of Debconf.
Right, I'm fairly dubious that we want to go in that direction. That's
wmy the mental model I had was more like the World Science Fiction
Convention (Worldcon), which avoids using professional event planners but
still has a legal structure to limit liability, despite running
conventions all over the world.
--
Russ Allbery (
rra@debian.org) <
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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