Organizing Software Freedom Camp 2022

@parmutownley The camp will be online. Although offline camp is a better idea. In that case we need to decide.

offline camp will be limited to a smaller geographic area so even if we do offline, online camp would still be valuable.

Charging a nominal fee for the registration in the camp

What about we charge a nominal fee for registration in the camp? For example, a fee of Rs 50 or Rs 100 per learner for registration.

Why?

I know we want to encourage more participation in the camp and free of charge registration is thought to be one way to do that. The problem that we currently face is people register and they are not at all serious about the camp as they don't show up. This is one thing we have learnt from previous camps. I think a nominal fee can make learners feel agency and they will be more careful and serious while registering. What I am aiming is for more of a psychological difference than us getting money.

The money we get via fee can be used for one of these:

• for funds in running our services or any of the initiatives https://fsci.in/initiatives that we have taken, like funding for the bifrost bridge.

• paying organizers.

• giving merchandise to learners if they reach the project phase. This can be an incentive too for learners to attend the camp.

Note: The main goal of the camp is convincing people about the Free Software philosophy https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html , integrate them in our community, get them started in contributing to free software (any one of these is fine as a goal). I think that learners being serious about the camp is one step towards this goal of convincing them about the Free Software.

in my opinion, it should be a pay if you want, as much as you want thing like how elementary does it. our main goal is to educate more people about free software... making pay-barriers will not help in that. there are plenty of volunteers who are willing to put in effort for no cost just to spread more awareness about free software...

@arya I think you missed the point. We are not solving the problem of convincing more people about free software, but filtering uninterested people from registering and this should help in convincing them about philosophy too. We have done two camps in my knowledge and in one, I was a learner and in the other, I was an organizer. In those two camps, we have agreed that we should encourage more and more participation and should not take any fee for registration.

But the problem comes is that most of the people register don't show up, even for the first session. In 2020, 200 people registered and 50 people showed up in the first session and we got 4-5 people in the community. In 2021, 100 people registered and 25 showed up in the first session and we got 3 people in the community at last from the camp.

The problem I am trying to solve is the wastage of organizers' time and effort when so many uninterested people register.

In principle, I agree that we should not charge any fee. But seeing the data and the reality, I only proposed a nominal fee for a psychological difference a learner will have due to payment. I think all these people can afford Rs 50 for a camp(I might be wrong, but otherwise how will they have devices to be online?). It will also give learners more agency.

I did not propose it for paying organizers, although that can be an option. I am happy volunteering for free of charge as well as I have done with last two camps and I am already very active in raising awareness without a cost.

I only have these thoughts and proposal. I don't know for sure if that works out. We need to think about it and we will only know when we implement and see the changes.

I support the idea of charging a nominal fee for registering as learners.

I think we can create a chat group now for discussions. Please suggest how to go about it. Creating a matrix room and bridge it to IRC and XMPP?

I think we should create a private group for organizing team and reuse the last year common room for public discussions. Anyone volunteering here can be invited to the private group. This will help us set expectations of time commitment better. We should probably ask each volunteer about minimum hours they can commit every week.

And I think that we can have clearly defined roles. Ask yourself about which work would you like to volunteer for and write down here. I think I will do outreach and publicity.

I think I will limit myself to sharing my experience (camp steps, tools used, schedule etc) from last two camps so people don't have to start from scratch.