A community funded event sponsor
ConfKick makes it possible for individuals to sponsor confernces and meetups focused, to begin with, on developer events.
A user can pledge an amount towards a conference/meetup/hackday as a token sponsorship, often a lot less than the price of a ticket to attend the event.
This money would be pooled together to allow ConfKick to act as a larger, corperate sponsor but provided by and for the community.
This would be focused on providing as much value to the community as possible, tending towards enabling smaller events that couldn't otherwise happen rather than large, corporate sponsored conferences.
There is a feeling that often community events are really only for pushing agendas/products/technologies and that without them the events would not happen, it doesn't have to be that way, the global community can help fund these events as seen by conferences like http://rubymanor.org
Why would someone want to pledge towards this?
- They cannot attend but would like to support the confernce
- They want to help out free meetups/hackdays that don't charge for entry but have running costs
- They like the work that the organisers are doing for the community and want to support them
- To promote themselves within the community
Other extras could be offered for sponsors
- access to special sponsor ticket discounts
- t-shirts and other swag from the conference without having to attend
- access to insider interviews with organisers and speakers
- early access to videos and other conference content
May enable users with other intagible assets to donate time/skills/materials to events such as management, promotion, hardware, food
Could be quite enabling for small businesses with low budgets to get involved as well
Large companies could donate as well as good will guestures, with less "direct return" on investment
Could setup recurring payments (direct debit etc) which go into a general pool which is shared across sponsorship on events as decided by the community.
Could encourgage conferences to source materials locally and help put money into the local economy as well.
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