Some incentives and changes.

[Bernie Innocenti]

ajh at linuxsymposium.org wrote:
> Bernardo,
> 
> I know that travel budgets have been hit very hard this year and it is
> affecting who will choose to submit a paper proposal.  I've been thinking
> of ways to help with this and I've come up with a couple things that I
> would like to offer and would love your feedback on things.
> 
> The first incentive is that if you submit a proposal for a paper or a
> tutorial and it is accepted by the committee we are going to give you one
> free pass to the Linux Symposium that you can allocate to someone else
> within your organization to attend.  
> 
> The second is that I am personally going to make some of my frequent flier
> miles available to help speakers with accepted papers with their flights. 
> I hope this can enable some good people who would not otherwise be able to
> attend to present a paper to make it to the event.
> 
> The third is that I am going to try to make available as much funding for
> lodging as possible to help cover costs for presenters.
> 
> So, if you've been working on anything interesting in the last year please
> do take the time to submit a proposal for the committee to take a look at! 
> We're seeing good registration numbers in general but the effect of the
> 'economic slowdown' is being seen mostly in presentation proposals and
> we'd very much like to see this change in the next week.
>
> If you have any other ideas please let me know.  One thing that has been
> suggested is allowing more presentations without a technical paper
> requirement, how do you feel about that?  Would that give you more
> incentive to submit a proposal?

Thank you very much for this offer.  I might consider coming with
a talk about Sugar, the sweetest open source learning engine
that originated from OLPC and now has wings of its own:

  http://www.sugarlabs.org/
  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/

I currently reside in Italy and have tiny budget for traveling,
which might pose a problem for my participation unless I can
find some funding.

While I'd be delighted to attend to the OLS, my colleagues who
reside in the US would certainly make better speakers with a
more affordable travel budget.  I have already asked them if
they'd like to take over.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://www.sugarlabs.org/