The 4th Annual Silent Auction

For the last three years, Balisage attendees have created the “Conspicuous Consumption Silent Auction”. It was a great success each year. We've raised over $1000 each year for the winners of the Students Support Awards. All the money raised is given to the students. All the costs are absorbed by other conference attendees and the donors. The auction items in the past have been a mixture of valuable books and software, fun toys, shirts and other odds-and-ends, and interesting topic-specific discussion “Dutch-treat” dinners.

We hope we can repeat this success for a fourth year. The students who have joined us in the past have been very impressive, and we want to support them every way we can. We need two kinds of donations:

1. Software, books (both print and e-books) and other items that will be of interest to others in our community: software from oXygen and Saxonica, and books from O’Reilly have been a big help in past yeasr. We’d love to also see software, books and other items from other sources.
2. Topic-specific discussion dinner leaders: in previous years, the dinners were attended by a topic expert and by four companions, the winners of the dinner auction items. Everyone paid for their own dinners (“Dutch treat”), and care was taken that they wouldn’t be too expensive for the auction winners: under $40. They have been very successful auction items and there were many people who were out-bided. So we’d like to see more dinners on a wider range of topics.

If you’ve got something that you think will be interest to bidders and if you want to support this year’s students, please send in detailed information about the items you are donating to silentauction2013@wilmott.ca. A photo of the item, of the donator's logo, or of the product's logo, helps us make a appealing bidding sheet.

For the dinners, include a title, a short description of what you think is an interesting topic, who will be the expert discussion leader, a short description of why that’ll be a good leader, and what you think is the best choice of how many diners should be invited to the dinner. The leader can be you. Alternatively, if you’d like to attend a dinner lead by an attending expert, you can nominate them. They’ll be asked if they agree to take on that role. The number of winners per dinner should be kept low, as they were last year, so that everyone at the table gets a chance to participate fully.

Thanks for your donations, and good luck with your bids. And looking forward to getting together with you at Balisage 2013.