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
Dan Sugalski@grimalkina Good grief. I'm happy to go on record saying any conference charging a thousand dollars a ticket should 100% cover speaker's travel expenses. This isn't some university club running a little gaming con, at those prices it's a full-on business. Under capitalism we trade money for goods and/or services, and speaking is a service. They absolutely should pay.
@wordshaper I really appreciate you saying so, I felt nervous writing this wondering if I was somehow out of step with the culture here. But it's a huge energy and time away from family expenditure and speakers' creative work is then a significant piece of event marketing!
@grimalkina Yeah. I did conference talks and tutorial sessions back in the day. They were all open source conferences so somewhat low-budget and it was OK for sessions I *volunteered* for to be paid by comping entrance. (I suspect for
For sessions where the con *asked* me to give the talk, or special talks like tutorials? The assumption was always "I am generating revenue for you, you're paying travel and hotel and entrance".
@grimalkina I never did talks at regular cons so I can't say what I would've done, but these days I absolutely wouldn't go talk at one of those without compensation, even if I were already going.
There also used to be a feeling of "you're doing it as marketing for your consulting job!" which... yeah, that worked for low budget cons but those days are *long* gone -- if they're asking you to dance on stage they're asking for work, and work should be properly paid for.