Cat HicksI 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
I will figure out a path to my own sharing of work, but it is sad to me to feel there is this intellectual community you need to have a FAANG credit card to be part of. That's just not how it should work and we will see the consequences of these structures quickly in who gets to be on stage. This isn't a call out of any single organization, I'm always really honored to be thought of, but it's hard for me to understand how you can sell $1000 tickets on our content and not support creators
I'm fine -- I more share this because I worry for the younger people around me who don't have my platform and audience but deserve it just as much.
Conversely I think very well of the organizations who have maintained their intentionality on this, which if you look back at my last year of public talks you can be assured every one of them was an organization that thought about supporting the creators they invited.
Thommy@grimalkina I hate how tech conferences act like the only thing that exists are big companies with travel budgets. Even when they have token "indie" or small business discounts, everything else about it is designed around excluding those they know they can't extract much money from. And frankly, it makes the conferences way less interesting! It's of course their loss if you're not doing a talk for them.
cognitively accessible math@thomasjwebb @grimalkina Education conferences, too. Vendors talkin' to admins at school districts and the sessions about learning are pretty much a side thing. (If they cared, they'd get those recorded and broadcast and shared for free.)