The dark side of open source conferences

you are asking that the event organizers police the behavior of all attendees, no matter where in the city they go

The aim is to focus event organisers on minimising the risk to their sponsor's reputation. Our reputation can be harmed by participants' behaviour outside the event venue, so we do want organisers' focus there too.

The terms aren't harsh. A harsh term would be for organisers to indemnify us against damage to us caused by the behaviour of their participants. Indemnification is a pretty standard contract term, and it is noticeable by its absence.

Invoking the clause is a no-brainer. Take the worst case -- do you think our reputation would suffer or be enhanced by being sued by conference organisers after we withdrew suddenly following an unseemly incident? Even in the unlikely event that we lost legally, we'd still win.

You've got to understand that this sort of behaviour is a sponsor's worst nightmare. We hand over some small amount of services or money, but our entire reputation is on the line.

Those outside business don't understand how important reputation is. Consider a business where you can work hard to get, say, a 10% growth in sales each year. That takes a huge amount of thought and money spent on product lines, sales staff, promotion and so on. Consider that a 10% hit to revenue from a "reputation incident" would be regarded as minor. That is, the least you can expect is to waste an entire year's effort by everyone in the business.

It's more than just reputation. Large sums of money are spent on what is basically the happiness of staff; for example, at least half of our leasing expenditure is spent on getting nice office space rather than the cheapest dump. Having spent all that money the last thing we need is for more than half of the staff to be disgruntled because we facilitated some outrageous behaviour.

Anyway, I've probably written enough so that you can see the view from another side of the fence.