Some of us are lucky enough to attend to some marvellous conventions, made with love by amazing people, they give us some great event with top notch speakers, incredible venues, amazing parties.
Theses conferences are pulled out with a huge work by volunteers, some sponsors, so they can cut the cost of theses event to the minimum.
the minimum is still a bit of money, money some don't have.
We came out with an alternative model for that ... SquatConf
This will not be your everyday conference, but it will be a on donation with good talk from amazing people, and you will be able to contribute to it if you want too
## How can this be possible ?
Conference have huge cost to handle, and most of the time ticket prices are not even close to the real cost per attendee, see [this transparency report](http://2014.lxjs.org/about/) to understand how a 0 profit conference can pull that. Still it costs a pile of cash to do that
Venues, transportation, hotels, food are really nice perks to have, but ...
If you held a conference in a Squat,
If the Speakers advance their travel expenses,
If you host them in some Friend's home,
If you tell people to bring some food and
If you know for SURE that the wifi will be shaky ...
you can get a 0 cost conference made with love,but a little rougher
SquatConf is an Idea that came after [LXJS](http://2014.lxjs.org/), It was a great conference, and the organisation made an amazing job, and after the final day of the event we ended up [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 live, now the idea matured and some folks ([mmalecki](https://github.com/mmalecki),[no9](https://github.com/no9/),[substack](https://github.com/substack/), ...) are in the loop now.