I say "pay" rather than just "attend" because if you attend a tutorial you are both "just checking out what's new" and you are not paying, "putting you above the other people" if that is what you worry about.
Now, that is admittedly psychological speculation. What I think though, is that free tutorial attendance if you are a tutorial presenter yourself, or something similar, is/was an important goodie and reason to attend OOPSLA, at least for me.
RonCrocker had a proposal for last year which would have achieved this in a clever way: Increase the general fee for OOPSLA by the amount for 1 tutorial and allow people to attend 1 tutorial for free. This would not have reduced the amount brought in for tutorials unless the overall price scared people away, and it would provide a way for insiders (and outsiders) to attend without feeling that they were in some ways inferior.
Moreover, the presence of elders in tutorials would likely increase the perceived value to most people, assuming the insiders didn't act like jerks during the tutorial. -rpg
Not sure how this would work out. Remember Amy Jo Kim's book on web community building? My copy is not at hand (it is in storage), but I think one of her main points was was to recognize people in the community explicitly for the roles they play and reward them while emphasizing that what counts is the service to the community. I don't think OOPSLA does this well: Roles are established along very traditional lines (steering committee, program committee) and elders are not recognized at all. How would a more refined community with explicit roles look like? --DirkRiehle
It seems that the part of this that would work is to make all tutorials open access - the price could be the same as the "+1 tutorial" price and achieve the same goal. (Perhaps that's the next topic, CreativePricingModels...) --RonCrocker
The Agile Development Conference used that model. You can go to anything. --RonJeffries
I'm getting the sense from some of the researchers and academics that many of them are almost exclusively interested in the technical program. They want to have the technical papers in a single track not competing with other technical papers. Perhaps we could consider on a two-level system in which people pay a lower price to attend only the technical program, but have a slightly higher "full pass." This way those rare people who want their ears sawed off by the tedium of technical details can vegetate in the one continually dark room where the technical papers are being presented all day.
Of course, I love the garbage collection papers, so I don't mean them.
I wouldn't prefer such a two-level system, but I'm wondering how the researchers and academics would respond to it.
-rpgHmm - what's the aim of the price differentiation? Why not just give academics a discount (one way or another) - e.g. the HousingScholarship or EducatorsScholarship.