[penguicon-general] Creative Commons Discount for Program Participants

[Roxanne King]

chuck child wrote:
>  From my current understanding, the problem we are trying to solve is 
> this:   We get a goodly number of people who sign up for four panels, 
> prepare not a whit, and don't really have any enthusiasm about the 
> panels they are on, simply to get the discount.    Some of those don't 
> even bother to show up to the panels they are supposed to present.
>  

If that's what we're trying to solve, the preliminary solution is to 
identify those individuals and not have them be on panels anymore. "You 
didn't show up for half your panels, and you sucked on the panels you 
were on," is a fine reason for essentially firing them.

To be proactive against new recruits behaving like this, I would say 
that the Programming Coordinator inform the new recruit that this sort 
of behavior - not showing up, not being prepared - will cause an unhappy 
situation, and it's best to be avoided.

A long-time policy in fandom in general was to require non-guest 
panelists to pay for their membership up front, and then receive a 
refund if their performance met the necessary criteria, much like a 
gopher refund. You might want to investigate that option for new program 
participants that you don't know very well. The current situation where 
the program participants are all comp'ed ahead of time is relatively new.

Then Penguicon should also make a commitment to issuing refund checks on 
Sunday afternoon. Many gophers and program participants can't really 
afford the con any other way.

Returning to lurk status,
Roxanne King