The SquatConf Manifest

What is SquatConf ?

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 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 2014 November 15th .

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, It was a great conference, and the organisation made an amazing job, and after the final day of the event we ended up dominictarr, joates and I talking about autonomous self driving boats when this idea came to live, now the idea matured and some folks (mmalecki,no9,substack, ...) are in the loop now.

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 ideas to improve this thing ? they are gladly welcome.
• we plan to make it zero sum ... ie, we will split eventual benefit with attendees, ROI in a squat conference !!!

mhhh I want to talk here !!!

Please see here to propose a talk