We hope to be in touch very soon with dates for GOSH 2018 in Shenzhen and an invitation to apply. In the meantime, the organising committee are working hard behind the scenes to fund the meeting and try to offer travel stipends. The majority of last year’s budget went on getting many awesome people to Chile but centralised fundraising at that scale becomes harder with each year GOSH runs (it’s easier to start new initiatives than sustain them in the longer term as we all know!).
This is a request for assistance. If you know any local organisation who might fund people from your country/region to get to GOSH, or any organisation/company you think might be willing to sponsor GOSH, we’d love to hear from you
Below is a flyer you can send to potential sponsors and we encourage you to go forth and contact people, but keep organizers@openhardware.science informed before you get in touch with them so we don’t have several people sending emails to the same people!
For those of us with the privilege of academic funding, would you be able to charge a registration fee? It would be hard to justify a donation to an auditor, but a registration fee is normal and expected. I appreciate we don’t want to scare people off and I’m not suggesting it should apply to everyone, but I also suspect I’m not the only one whose institution would be willing to support me in this way.
It’s probably more work than a big block of sponsorship, but it might be a useful way to raise some modest funds.
For those of us whose academic institutions can not fund our attendance at the conference because we are from low-income-middle-country and we have the intention to attend, I believe there should be a way out and will be happy to know.
The conference is important for my community as an academic institution to be able to know more about GOSH.
Thanks @ymi for the link to ASAUK. The GOSH organising committee are looking into mixed funding models so we can help those who need it with travel costs. As @rbowman suggests, if people can access grant funding and are happy to pay an optional registration fee, that is helpful for everyone because it allows us to reallocate the funds for those who can’t.
More ideas for how this might work coming very soon! We are looking into matched funding opportunities so people’s contributions go further.
