Disclaimer: runs free events, where organizers are volunteers, in which we're still trying to find sponsorship money for small speaker honorariums.

While I'm grateful to ccc organizers and understand that things are sometimes clearer and easier without the distorting effects of money...

I think defaulting to offering an honorarium to speakers is really healthy. The cultural baseline can easily be set to that any "financially comfortable" speakers donate it straight back without collecting, while only those who need it, keep it.

Why? Because speakers with many areas of expertise cannot afford to spend time speaking for free. Some really rad people can, but just saying that many cannot. And while it's maybe not a big deal if there's narrow representation of ppl volunteering at the ticket booth, there is a larger loss of possibility when cash-poor types of speakers can't afford to show up.

Speakers are the bringers of ideas, and who speaks affects the intellectual space that an event creates. And it might be said that creating that intellectual space is the main point of an event. The other motivation is maybe creating a new relational space, new relationships between people that tend to be fostered and grown around the feeding trough of presentation content.

So the "intellectual" is about "what gets broadcast" and "relational" is more about "who gets enticed to attend", and "which ideas fuck and make new ideas in the conversations between those attendees". All of the above flows from the speakers, and so I'd argue that it's more important to use the powerful magic of money to help certain speakers show up.

I think the sweet spot for starting to experiment with honoraria is: low enough to be a bit insulting to those who would be driven by the money, but high enough to meaningfully cover some costs for someone just trying to get by :)