Financial Aid for PyCon 2016¶

Goals of Financial Aid¶

The goal of the PyCon UK financial aid program is to ensure that PyCon UK’s delegates and speakers reflect the broader Python community, both in the UK and the world. The Python community is a diverse one, and one of the ways this diversity manifests itself is in a diversity of financial background. Restricting attendance to only those who can pay their own way or who can have their attendance funded by their employer necessarily leads to a conference that is not representative of the wider community.

This means that it is important that we enable both delegates and speakers who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference to attend. The easiest way to do this is with direct grants for financial aid, which can come in various forms. Some of these are fairly classic: direct grants of money, subsidised/free tickets, paid-for accommodation. Some of these are more unusual: funding childcare facilities or having a child-friendly policy, for example.

All of these ideas are in service to the goal that, wherever possible, people who would like to attend PyCon UK 2016 are empowered to attend PyCon UK 2016, regardless of their personal circumstances. Ours is a community of inclusion: applying a financial test for membership runs counter to our principles.

To put this more concretely we have two goals:

Obtain a wide variety of speakers. Speakers are an important resource for PyCon UK, and it should be noted that they do a large amount of unfunded work in order to present. We should enable a wide variety of speakers at PyCon UK, and while we should aim for many of them to be local, we should also endeavour to find some speakers from further afield. Those speakers in particular will likely need financial assistance for travel.
Obtain a wide variety of delegates. Again, our primary focus should be enabling potential delegates from the UK and Europe to attend. However, substantial value is obtained by having delegates from further afield attend, and money should be set aside to assist in their travel.

I’ll break down my proposed approaches for those two groups below.

One thing I am explicitly excluding from this discussion is teachers and the teacher track. This is because historically our funding for teachers has come entirely out of the grant from BAML. My expectation is that this will continue, and that the BAML grant will be entirely earmarked for the teacher track and will not touch the financial aid budget. I’m happy to work with Carrie-Anne on integrating the teacher applications into the same forms etc. as the financial aid stuff, but I don’t expect it to affect my budget at all.

Speakers Tickets¶

Historically PyCon UK has had a policy of “everybody pays” which applies to both organisers and speakers. This policy has come under fire in some circles recently as failing to adequately take into account the (essentially unpaid) work that speakers do for a conference and the value they add. This unpaid work is necessarily more difficult for those who are already financially limited, which means that it disproportionately affects minority groups.

The “everybody pays” mantra[0] is an important one to both PyCon UK and to the broader Python conferences. The idea of funding speakers is a compelling one, and good cases can be and have been made for funding speaker attendance[1]. However, I do not believe that we should be pioneering such a model at this conference.

Instead, I want to propose a model adapted from that used by PyCon AU in the last few years. The policy would be:

All speakers may apply for financial aid to cover expenses. Speakers will be prioritised over delegates.
Money will be set aside in the financial aid budget to cover free admission for all speakers. That is, all speakers will be entitled to free admission.
However, all speakers will be faced with the choice to pay for their ticket. It will be made clear that if they do, the money for that ticket will go directly and wholly into the financial aid budget, and will be used to cover the costs of speakers less able to pay.
In particular, speakers whose attendance is funded by companies will be encouraged to pay.

The goal with this policy is to make it clear to those considering the CFP that they will be able to attend for free if their talk is accepted: that is, they will not be asked to pay for the right to speak. However, it also has the goal of explicitly indicating to those that can afford to pay that their doing so will directly enable other speakers and delegates. Ideally, this will lead to the impact on the financial aid budget of free tickets for speakers being minimised, or possibly eliminated.

By default, we may want a radio box here for speakers that has got the “pay for ticket” option selected by default. That essentially opts speakers into paying by default, while enabling speakers to opt out.

This policy can be summarised as: “everybody pays, unless you can’t”.

Delegates Tickets¶

Over the past few years, we have offered a number of subsidised tickets for delegates. Last year in particular offered community tickets, tickets for students, and tickets for those who were unemployed or otherwise had reduced incomes.

My proposal this year is to roll these things together. Complexity makes our lives difficult, and we should aim to have as straightforward a process as possible. For this reason, delegates that need access to reduced-price tickets will be directed to apply for financial aid for their ticket. This will allow us to bring them in to the financial aid process, and ensures that we don’t earmark money for reduced-cost tickets that we end up not using: instead it can be rolled back into financial aid for other attendees.

It will be made clear that students and those on low/no income will be prioritised for heavily discounted tickets. Note that by default financial aid will not offer free tickets, merely heavily discounted ones: this ensures that delegates have some motivation to let us know if they can no longer attend, which will free up their ticket for others.

I also plan to remove the notion of community tickets as a formalised category: it’s not clear that that was a successful approach last year, and it adds additional administrative overhead I don’t really want. I am open to being convinced on this point, but for now I’m assuming that offering a new ticket category is unwise.

The effect of this is that people applying for financial aid need guaranteed tickets, because the financial aid process is going to be slower than the standard ticket sales method. We’ll need to decide as a committee how many tickets to set aside for financial aid, with the understanding that we will over time free them up back to the standard sales channel if they are unclaimed.

Expenses: Travel, Accommodation, and Other¶

Historically, other PyCons have required itemised breakdowns of these costs. However, many financial aid coordinators in other conferences are coming to the view that this represents unacceptable administrative overhead, and I’m inclined to agree with them. It is generally unwise for us to make anyone, attendees or the committee, categorise expenses. Instead, we should assume that delegates have a good understanding of how to cover their costs.

This means that we’ll ask delegates to apply for a flat sum of money to put towards their expenses. We will make it clear to delegates that the lower this number is the more likely it is that their grant will be accepted in full: for larger sums of money we’re likely to make partial grants rather than full ones. This works because partial grants are more likely to be useful than no grant at all, especially for those travelling from overseas. LVH has suggested a ‘flood fill’ algorithm for funding grants[2], which I think will be useful here.

For the sake of accommodation, we will also volunteer to put financial aid applicants in contact with one another for the purposes of arranging shared accommodation. We will make it clear that sharing accommodation will likely reduce costs, which makes their grant request smaller and more likely to be granted. We will also allow grant applicants to specify constraints on who they’d like to share accommodation with (for obvious reasons).

To be clear: we will not be asking attendees to account for their spending. We will not demand receipts. We will ask for them to return any unspent funds, but I expect that we won’t have much, especially if we tend to partially fulfil grants. It’s my belief that the money saved by undertaking this work does not justify the a) increased workload on volunteers, and b) the feeling of grant recipients that they are being policed and distrusted.

It may be sensible to say that anyone who applies for financial aid, regardless of the success of their application, should be offered a reduced-price ticket. I haven’t decided if we should pursue that direction or not yet, and feedback would be welcome here.

Process¶

Data Collection¶

For data collection, we plan to use ti.to alongside the rest of our ticketing function. This helps keep our systems fairly simple, while providing a good centralised location to collect all data about financial aid applicants.

Additionally, thanks to the use of ti.to we can ensure that only administrators can access the personal data of the grant applicants.

Proposed Questions¶

The proposed questions are below, including the type of answer that can be provided, as will the purpose of the question.

Question	Answer Type	Purpose
Preferred Name	Free text	For use when communicating with applicants.
Contact email address	Email	For use when communicating with applicants.
Requested Grant (in GBP)	Currency	Will filter into grant process.
Have you already registered for a ticket, or would you like one set aside for you until your grant is allocated?	Boolean	If attendence is contingent on having a ticket but the delegate cannot afford one without aid, we may need to ‘reserve’ a ticket until the grant is processed.
Applied to speak?	Boolean/Number	If they have applied to speak, we’d like to know in order to support them. We should aim to have a ‘proposal ID’ the delegate can provide in this field, as well.
Planned attendance days	Date	If an attendee is planning to attend only part of the conference, that’s useful to know.
Planned attendance tracks	Date	Useful for identifying teachers etc.
Preferred Payment Method	Selector	We need to decide how we’re open to paying grants, and allow delegates to select their preference. This may imply further up questions.

Committee¶

The process of awarding grants will want to be done by a committee. The job of the committee members will be to review grant proposals and to allocate those proposals a ‘score’ that reflects how important their receiving a grant is believed to be. This score will then be modified by a few fixed properties (are they applying to speak etc.), and will then be fed into the grant application algorithm.

If you’d like to be considered to be on this committee, please let me know. I won’t be choosing this committee yet, certainly not before we’ve finalised the process and begun advertising the grants, but I’d like to prepare a list of people who are interested as early as possible.

The committee will be chosen by the beginning of the call for proposals (see Dates).

Key Dates¶

The financial aid proposal website will be open from the beginning of the Call For Proposals, and will remain open until the close of ticket sales (see Dates). However, to avoid congestion and a heavy workload at the end of the process, there will be several “early rounds” of grant allocation. The goal here will be to encourage people to apply as early as possible.

These dates will be allocated once the dates for CfP and similar have been decided.