Dear Otto,
You're right. The budget is useless anyway because IFIP does not share the surplus, nor the losses. If the budget is wrong, this is the problem of the organizer, not ours, so why do we care?
I've spent so much time iterating with the many organizers until they have a sensible budget (knowing perfectly well that no one would even read it), that I think we should stop this silly process.
Or perhaps should we clarify that the budgetary information has only to be provided when there is some surplus/loss share by IFIP. This case has never happened in TC6 during the last 6 years but, who knows, could be useful some day.
According to me the only relevant and mandatory budgetary information on the ERF should be the explicit mention of the IFIP fee per participant. [And note that this field is *not* present on the current ERF.] Going further is only speculations. We will only know the number of participants at the end. I also advise to clarify on the ERF which participants are taken into account: for example the number of *paying* participants, not counting invited speakers, local staff, etc. as this is usually the case.
Best regards, Guy
At 16:53 +0200 10/09/04, Otto Spaniol wrote:
Dear Dipak (and all),
there is an *urgent* need to simplify the event request forms.
Practically nobody delivers even a half-correct version. In most cases the figures presented are more or less (or even totally) ridiculous, in particular on page 2 where the budget is presented.
Today I received a particularly nice example where the break even number of participants was calculated by (believe it or not!): 0.07 participants.
Later on I checked other forms of the past and I found that the break even point for another conference (a very prominent TC6 conference) was given as: - 50 paricipants (yes, minus fifty !!!).
Wouldn't it be possible to prepare a self-explaining Excel sheet for the budget?
If things stay as they are the budget informations are totally useless and I will refrain from trying to correct strange request forms in the future.
Best regards
cc.: Christiane McKenzie (IFIP Secretariat) Otto
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