manifest/README.md

# What is SquatConf?

Some of us are lucky enough to attend marvelous conventions, made with love by amazing people. Great events with top-notch speakers, incredible venues, and amazing parties.

These conferences are run with huge contributions from volunteers, and financial support from sponsors, providing top-notch events at affordable prices.

But even then, they're not affordable for everyone.

We're building an alternative model: SquatConf.

SquatConf won't be your everyday conference, but we'll have good talks from amazing people. It'll be donation-based, and you'll get to contribute if you want to.

## How is this possible?

Conference costs are huge, and ticket prices are often [nowhere near the true per-attendee cost](http://2014.lxjs.org/about/), even for a non-profit conference.

Fancy venues, transportation, hotels and food are really nice perks to have, but…

If you hold a conference in a squat…
the speakers advance their travel expenses…
tell people to bring some food…
and the wifi will be dodgy for sure…

You'll have a zero-cost conference made with love, but a little rougher around the edges.

## Where and when?

November 15th 2014. A squat in Paris. For obvious reasons, we can't yet disclose where.

## The Plan

We are a bunch of crazy programmers that believe in anarchy and decentralised systems, conferences included.

We will provide a space, we will provide a context, some talks, and the rest will be up to you…

## Who is behind this?

The inception of SquatConf was at [LXJS](http://2014.lxjs.org/). It was a great conference, and the organisation did an amazing job, and after the final day of the event we ended up with [dominictarr](https://github.com/dominictarr), [joates](https://github.com/joates) and [I](https://github.com/gorhgorh) talking about autonomous self-driving boats when this idea came to life. Now the idea matured and some folks ([mmalecki](https://github.com/mmalecki), [nathan7](https://github.com/nathan7), [no9](https://github.com/no9), [substack](https://github.com/substack), ...) are in the loop now.

## Okay, so you're a bunch of idealists, running a 10-people conference in a dump.

What you'll get out of SquatConf is in the end exactly what you put into SquatConf.

- Tickets will be donation-based. You want a cheap conference? Give us nothing. You want food? Contribute.
- This won't be a 400-people event, but do you *need* that many people?
- We already have speakers lined up you're probably prepared to pay for :)
- You have ideas for improvements? Suggestions are always welcome.
- We plan to make SquatConf zero-sum. We'll split any profits with attendees — ROI on a conference!

## I want to give a talk!

Please see [our talks repository](https://github.com/squatconf/talks) to propose a talk.