# 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? Conferences 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, transporation, hotels and food are really nice perks to have, but… If you hold a conference in a squat… The speakers advance their travel expenses… Host in squatted spaces… 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 programers 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 want to 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.