Cat Hicks3d ago
I have been invited to but turned down 3 conferences talks already this year because they're told me it's new policy to not cover speaker travel under the assumption that your tech employer will cover it. I own my own small business as a researcher and my wife is an academic teaching professor, so I cannot ask my household to absorb that. I just want to generally observe that we are filtering the voices we're going to be able to hear from, with all this contraction
Show threadReginald

@grimalkina 🙏🏽

When my children were young, we ate thanks to the modest royalties from a few books like JavaScript Allongé. I spoke at and MC'd many conferences. I certainly wouldn't have gone anywhere without conferences paying for my travel and accommodation.

Thank you for advocating for this basic decency: A conference speaker should not be a corporate shill. A quality conference ensures this basic independence by funding its content, and that is the just path forward.

Mar 20 at 4:01pmWeb
Show threadJulian Schwarzenbach3d ago
@raganwald @grimalkina Suppliers/ vendors have marketing budgets that can cover costs for one of their team to attend/ present at conferences.
Experts are often in small consultancies/ microbusinesses/ academia etc. who do not have such deep pockets.
Typically, vendor pitches/ presentations are all sales spiel and deadly dull. The interesting presentations are generally from experts/ end users etc. If conference organisers just go to vendor led presentations, their reputation will soon decline and hit the commercial viability of the conference