On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 10:19 AM, Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@gmail.com> wrote:
admission fee waived or reduced, all the rest MUST pay, even if you give a talk or serve in other capacity. As others said you are doing a "public service" to the rest of the community and if you give a nice and valuable talk you will get the
You know what I would suggest. Give presenters who committed a sufficient time in advance an option to have free admission, and an option to pay and donate their free admission opportunity back. Whether something is a "public service" or not is a matter of perspective. Attending and paying admission is presumptively a public service also. Should one interested in performing one public service be forced to perform another? Assume for the sake of argument, it's a more valuable service for a person to present than to pay admission, because if there's noone presenting, then interest and attendance fall. As long as you are not encountering abuses such as 'faux presenters' just presenting for admission. Not all public service is free to the public. Presumably there must be some motivation for a speaker to present; sometimes that is altruistic, sometimes that is not. If that motivation is free admission, but for the community their service is still valuable, then who am I to argue with that? One question you could ask... would the person even be there if they were not giving a presentation? If they would not, then making them pay to come donate their time sounds like a proposition that is more adverse to the presenter. In regards to 'fairness', waiving admission for a presenter is not unfair, if any attendee had an equal opportunity for proposing to present; those paying simply did not avail themselves or perhaps did not have a meaningful thing to present....
It will be really unfair for those paying (even if their companies do
-- -JH