PHP "community"

[Simon Wistow]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 10:35:28AM +0000, Greg McCarroll said:
> And that tradition has stuck and influenced LPW, and it isn't just for 
> moral reasons alone - if you run an event where nobody is profiting 
> you tend to get the goodwill of groups and people like Westminster 
> University (who have supported other open source events) and companies 
> like O'Reilly - apologies for skipping the full list of sponsors.

There's also another very good reason the LPW was free ... it was a lot 
easier that way. 

No need to set up a separate bank account, being free manages 
expectations (no coffee, food, tshirts or wifi - coffee and food 
potentially bringing extra health and safety regulation).

Interestingly I did get people asking that it be more expensive to make 
it easier to justify to their bosses. Particularly at banking 
institutions.

One way I got round that was to essentially sell them a "Platinum 
Sponsorship" deal or some other shennanigans ... the company "sponsors" 
for say 500 pounds, that goes straight behind the bar for the post 
conference social and as a reward for sponsoring the company gets 5 free 
places.

Another thing we did was to get three banks to bring over a well known 
"Face" from the community. Each of the banks paid for a day of training 
and then the face did a free talk at LPW. 

We also all chipped in and paid for someone to come over once.

I started writing up some thoughts about free conferences here many 
years ago

http://thegestalt.org/simon/guerilla_conference_organising.txt

never really finished them though.