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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I've spoken at lots of conferences, brought friends to many of my talks, and would do exactly what he did in the same circumstance.

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As a counter example, I have been to a number of conferences where the speakers/presenters/panelists and volunteers were expected to pay the full registration fee, so as you can imagine, friends/family and +1's wouldn't get special treatment.

While some events are pretty laid back, it looks like the registration for this event cost ~$2000, which is a pretty penny. My gut instinct would be to check with the event organizers first before trying to bring a +1, but I think the OP assumed that because he was able to negotiate with the travel coordinators for two one way tickets, one for his wife (instead of one round trip ticket), he probably assumed that this was implicit consent for his wife to tag along at the conference. Seems like a big mis-understanding that was confounded by poor treatment from security staff (and before we start ragging on the security staff, it is worth mentioning that event security tends to be a thankless, miserable job. Crappy wages and hours, and depending on the event, you spend most of your time dealing with people who treat you like shit.)

Who would speak at an event that charged speakers to do so?

These events may charge $2000 a head, but it doesn't cost them $2000, or even $5, to let a +1 watch your talk.

Everybody who has ever spoken at PyCon for one (and volunteers as well): http://jessenoller.com/blog/2011/05/25/pycon-everybody-pays

It looks like the OP is an established consultant/teacher, so he probably only goes to conferences that invite him to speak (and my guess is, from what I have heard about you tptacek, that you are in the same boat), so he may be unfamiliar with the practice. But for us peons, with little to no name recognition, conference papers and talks can be a big resume booster, so it's not out of the question to pay-to-speak (you still have to go through the proposal process though). In my old industry, this was standard practice, and because almost everyone had their conference registration and travel paid for by their employer, it wasn't a huge deal.

I think I've had to pay to talk at any association for computing machinery, association for computing in the humanities, american library association, society of american archivists, society of california archivists, and collation for networked information meeting I've given a talk at. Didn't used to have to pay to talk at digital library federation meetings; but that was when your organization had to pay a 5 figure membership to send folks. I've even had to pay to talk at the university of california computing services conference. I din't have to pay to talk at the library of congress or the national archives. Those are pretty much the only places I've given a speech (besides in high school when I was on the speech team).

At many acedemic conferences, it might be only speakers showing up. Anyways, increasing the number of papers you accept is a good way to boost attendance.

SIGGRAPH and USENIX are two high-profile conferences where almost everyone attending pays, whether speaking or not. Both do make exceptions for a handful of invited keynotes.

The same with IEEE: conferences are intended to make money for the IEEE and for the local organization hosting the conference.

> As a counter example, I have been to a number of conferences where the speakers/presenters/panelists and volunteers were expected to pay the full registration fee,

At TechEd, Microsoft picks you, guides your session abstract wording, reviews and changes your slides, specifies your clothing, tells you when to show up for booth duty at the Microsoft booth, and pays you for it. You're basically a community mouthpiece for Microsoft. This is very much a vendor event.

But would you have tried to show up more than 30 minutes ahead of your speaking slot if you were bringing a wife who didn't speak English who didn't have a conference preregistration?

Lest anyone think I'm being judgmental I personally might have shown up about 0 minutes before I had to talk and behaved exactly like he did.

Where does it say that his wife doesn't speak English? Just that she is not American.

Oh did it not say that? I may have gotten that impression from some other comments here.

The scale of these conferences necessitates a strict badge rule. To get a badge, you need a registration. No badge = asked to leave. The security drones don't have the authority to issue badges on the spot and are programmed to kick out non-badge holders. Good for you that you would have cancelled 30 mins before the talk but it still would be a breach of contract most likely.

I took a +1 to an RSA talk without a problem. RSA is gigantic (it eats Moscone) and badge-controlled. I just said "I need this person here in order to do the talk".

The typical solution is to assign a person with the authority to let +1 guests in to the registration desk or at least make sure that such a person can be contacted when needed. This is fairly common in my experience regardless of the scale of the event so I'm not sure why you're trying to make it look like this was somehow unreasonable.

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