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Vote on Oct 14!
Jan
13
(2007)
Northern Voice 2007 Travel Bursaries
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Northern Voice is definitely the most community-oriented conference I’ve heard of. First, they keep the cost so low it’s essentially free when compared with other tech (and even non-tech) conferences. If you’re in Vancouver, there’s not much of a financial barrier to attend.
But, what if you’re not in Vancouver? What if you’re a blogger/student from Small Town BC (or beyond)? Well, now there’s the Northern Voice 2007 Travel Bursaries. All you have to do is write a blog post or record a podcast that describes how you meet a few criteria, and you may be awarded one of 6 travel bursaries of $500CDN each so you can offset the costs of attending. How freaking cool is THAT? There’s no mention of the source of the bursaries, whether a philanthropist or corporate donation was involved, or if they come from registration fees. Either way, it’s awesome, and something I’d like to see from more conferences (many offer student discounts, some even comp admission to individuals, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a conference offering to reimburse people for travel expenses too).
I’m looking forward to seeing who gets these bursaries. Hopefully it really makes a difference in getting some people to join in, who would have not been able to be there otherwise.
As an added community-oriented bonus, how many other conferences have an all-hands spaghetti supper as one of the key events?
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2 Responses to “Northern Voice 2007 Travel Bursaries”
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Thanks (as always!) for helping to point out NV stuff to the wider blogosphere, D’Arcy.
Perhaps we’ll post this as a follow up when the deadline gets closer, but the long story short explanation is that the main UBC Campus was significantly cheaper. Since we had already done all our planning and costing, and we are a non-profit conference, we thought that using some of those savings to enable more people to attend would be a good use.
I’m super-stoked to see what comes of this, and perhaps in future years we’ll get more sponsors to specifically fund this.
any time, boris! nv/moosecamp has been so cool, interesting, and important, that I think everyone should go. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve said it before, but NV has become my only must-attend event. Over WWDC, NMC, Merlot, etc…