Should AsyncAPI org bear the costs for traveling + accommodation for speakers ?

[smoya]

Originally posted by @smoya in #381 (comment)

I raised this concern during our last meeting (recording here).

People might not have a budget for traveling as not all speakers are sponsored by their company. Some might not have even a job.
In order to give the same opportunity to anyone, we should evaluate the idea of paying for travel + accommodation costs for the speakers.
We can do it in several ways, depending on the budget we have:

1. Bear the costs for all speakers.

Equality. This will be the simplest solution; we offer the same to everyone. The obvious problem is our budget, which is not infinite; not sure if we could afford that.

2. Bear the costs for those who really need it

Equity. People could mention their needs via the CfP form (as mentioned in #381 (reply in thread)), and we can study each case individually.
In this way, we leave companies the responsibility to pay their employees for the travel, and only help those cases where this can't happen.

[jansche]

As you mentioned, the only way of creating a truly inclusive space is to bear the costs of all speakers. The conf could still allow companies to pay T&E (travel and expense) for their employees who speak (collect that information from the CfP process, speakers most probably already know if their T&E can get covered), but the saved $$ should go into scholarships and other means of promoting inclusion.
This also an indirect way of collecting sponsorships for inclusion options. The conf could offer to list companies that cover their employee's T&E in a special sponsor category (e.g. Inclusion Partners, Inclusion Sponsors or similar).

If you don't pay speakers or just a subset of them, the conf could always be accused of making decisions for the money during the selection process: "They didn't want to afford speaker X from Y, but speaker Z had their T&E covered through their company, so they had an unequal advantage."

[derberg]

If you don't pay speakers or just a subset of them, the conf could always be accused of making decisions for the money during the selection process: "They didn't want to afford speaker X from Y, but speaker Z had their T&E covered through their company, so they had an unequal advantage."

luckily the whole selection process is transparent, and different community members vote on proposals, and budget is the last thing they are aware off 😄

anyway, CfP allows applicant to mark if they need sponsorship or not, let's see

[quetzalliwrites]

I vote for option two because it will probably be the only way to realistically have enough money to help the few speakers that truly need it the most.

I think we could only vote for option one if we had considerably more money as an initiative.

[Barbanio]

I also vote for option 2.
It would be ideal to pay for travel and accommodation for all participants, but that would require a huge budget.