Re: [Swarmfest2007] light bulb!

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Jim Anderson wrote:
> I like the idea of having a couple of keynote speakers - and we certainly
> have the funds. Why not simply allocate $1K or $2K for speakers. 
>   
Great, I would think air fare, hotel costs, per diem and a speaking fee 
would be minimally $2K per speaker.   Just to AVOID having the same old 
people cover the same old ground, I can't see how it makes sense to be 
cheap.  In my opinion, for SwarmFest, we should be recruiting serious 
scientists, and try to have them going home feeling good about the 
experience.  Part of that is treating them right, the other part is 
giving them some reason to sit through some fraction of the affair, and 
that means having more than one of them (several featured speakers).

But if they like it, they may say good things about us,  which will 
break us into new communities, and we'll have some hope, someday, of 
getting real consulting money or maybe even get written into NSF grants.  

The Google Summer of Code thing could be just the kind of pipeline we 
need to get the skilled workers to do that consulting (modeling or 
technical).

If we were trying to be a platform with a user group and be service 
oriented, we'd killing ourselves to pay a part time maintenance staff, 
or keep people like Todd Thomson on board, or at least talking about 
funding student developers, but we are not.  (I'm baffled.) So this 
isn't a user group meeting in any tangible sense.  

What are we saving the money for?

Marcus