Many colleges and universities have a speakers bureau that has money available to pay honoraria and I can tell you from experience that $5k is really not much for someone like Richard Stallman.
If you can put a bug in some Comp Sci professor's ear at some local school, then he may be willing to try and push something like this through his school's channels. Just make sure they keep the event open to the public.
In the early '90s, I was the forums coordinator for KU's Student Union Activities. We had a budget of about $20k and through some creative planning and a couple big name speakers that people were willing to pay a nominal fee for, we were able to extend our budget by another $5k.
With the right promotion, I could easily see Stallman filling a mid-sized auditorium with CS, law and possibly some students from Econ and then there's all the public riff-raff like us that would come. If I knew Stallman was speaking in K.C., I'd drive in from Lawrence to see it.
If he were coming to Lawrence, would folks from K.C. make the trip?
On 2/13/07, Jared jared@hatwhite.com wrote:
I propose we have a fundraiser:
http://puggy.symonds.net/~kalyan/rms-letter.txt
None of us are very good with money, or we wouldn't be geeks, so I'll be brief: does anyone have $5,000 to spare?
Fundraiser concluded. Moving on to new business...
-Jared _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug