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
## Where / when ?
A Squat in Paris, that will not yet be disclosed for obvious reasons ...
It will happened at the end of November.
## The plan
We are a bunch of crazy programers that believe in anarchy and distributed systems, conferences included.
We will provide a place, we will provide a context, some talks, and the rest will be up to you ...
## Who is behind this
SquatConf is an Idea that came after [LXJS](http://2014.lxjs.org/), It was a great conference,
and the organisation made one of the most 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 mature and (insert list of interested folks here ... ^^) are in the loop
## Ok so you are a bunch of idealist that will make a 10 ppl conference in a dump ...
What you will get out of SquatConf is, in the end literally what you will want put in SquatConf .
- Tickets will be on donation, you want a cheap conf give 0, you want provided food ...
- this won't be a 400 ppl conf for sure, but do you NEED that much ppl ?
- there are already speakers interested for who you would enjoy spend some bucks :)
- you have idead to improve this thing ? they are gladly welcome.
- we plan to make it zero sum ... ie, we will split eventual benefit with atendees, ROI in a squat conference !!!
## additional notes
so this is the first draft of what I think squatconf is, feel free to modify =)
We have the venue almost secured, we should now think of a date ... the latter the better, considering that we have not yet enough speakers and no intendance.
what we could pull in this little time frame would be IMO
- single track
- one / two day depending nbr of speakers
- should be in a week end so volunteers/attendees don't blow holiday to help/attend.
- 50 / 70 attendees (chairs, minimal internet/ local network)
what I already have
- a space (we can talk about it but not here)
- sound system for the room
- video proj.
- domain : [squatconf.eu](http://squatconf.eu/)
working on :
- lights
needed :
- people, lots of em :)
- website
- chairs
- minimal amount of food
a we need to finalise this doc and remove this part so we start to talk about it
we could create a gitter room to have an IRC like channel to chat with ppl that get involved and have history of our discutions.
gorhgorh
10 years ago