Registation Limits for DebConf 23

We are concerned that DebConf23 will get swamped with local free registration requests. We think we can handle 350 to 400 attendees on-site. We have accommodation for 200 bursaried attendees at the hotel. There are 20-30 more more rooms available for self-paying attendees. There are other hotels nearby.

We may have to hand-review the registrations and approve/reject some of them.

Here are some of the ways we could do this:

• Ask contributor status registration question: What is your status within Debian (project member/project contributor/free software contributor/other)
• Ask for more motivation in the "More Information", to help us review requests.
• Run the registration in multiple phases (project members, then contributors, then wider free software community, then anyone else)
• Request early registration for everyone, to guarantee attendance for project members.
• Limit registrations to X attendees, and close registrations at that point.
• Limit a % of registrations to local.
• Send an extra survey (external, designed when it's needed) to unknown attendees, to help evaluate them.
• Ask for registration endorsements from community members.

Some of the above could be done in parallel.

We could automatically determine who is a Debian project member, but not any other status within Debian.

If we're going to manually vet registrations, we need to ensure:

• We need to track registration order.
• We need to track whether registrations are approved or not.
• That we don't want to say that registrations are confirmed, if they aren't approved. This means a change in emails and messaging on the site.
• We don't take payment from anyone whose registration we won't approve.
• If we are going to be selective in approving registrations, we should publish our criteria for selection.

My thoughts are that:

• Strictly-enforced tiered registration processes are not going to be worth the effort to enforce.
• The early registration and bursaries can handle most of the international attendees, and ensure that they get their registration approved.
• We may have to close registration, once numbers hit a threshold, that's OK.
• Late registrations from known Debian people can be handled by back-channels, this isn't ideal, but it can help.
• Accepting all paid registrations until we close registration is probably OK. It creates a side-channel to get directly approved, but I don't expect that much abuse of this.
• We should define a criteria for how we select free attendees, after the end of the bursary process, and publish it.
• A sensible way to have a provisional registration would be to have a step before the end of the form (where you pay), that says your registration request is pending. So the registration isn't complete until approved.