I have been invited to but turned down 3 conferences talks already this year because they're told me it's new policy to not cover speaker travel under the assumption that your tech employer will cover it. I own my own small business as a researcher and my wife is an academic teaching professor, so I cannot ask my household to absorb that. I just want to generally observe that we are filtering the voices we're going to be able to hear from, with all this contraction
I will figure out a path to my own sharing of work, but it is sad to me to feel there is this intellectual community you need to have a FAANG credit card to be part of. That's just not how it should work and we will see the consequences of these structures quickly in who gets to be on stage. This isn't a call out of any single organization, I'm always really honored to be thought of, but it's hard for me to understand how you can sell $1000 tickets on our content and not support creators
If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://mastodon.social/users/grimalkina/statuses/116262296329273733 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)
RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116262296329273733
From an organiser who runs a conference that sells tickets that barely cover the costs of the event and still manages to fund a decent proportion of travel expenses for speakers who need it:
conference organisers need to do better.