Yes ... Not to mention the:

• "you have to share your room with another sponsored participant"
  and
• "sorry extra-european winners but we realized there's too many of you so we have no cash to sponsor your flights and we have to approve your super-mega-giga-economic-nocheckedinluggages-coach-journeys and handover sponsorship to Linux Foundation"
  and
• "may my "partner of life" share my same room given she's paying for her flight and any extra fees for the room?" - "Yes you can, you need to pay 2 extra nights" (which is reasonable and sharable BTW and IMHO) - "Why did you register a not-sponsored guest in your room" - "Because you told me!" - "Oh sorry, you are right, disregard our complaint"
  and
• My bank is gonna charge me extra costs if I receive payments/reimburse from abroad (>30Euro)

Surely not a valuable medal for your image here my dear sPONSORS NOT!

Seems like instead of getting good publicity and goodwill from sponsoring this competition, Nokia are instead making fools of themselves in the shabby way they're treating the winners.

o.O shame and sad.

Is it possible to make a constest for ourselves without any sponsor any prizes?just for fun maybe?

of course that would be possible, but how many developers would be attracted by community-only prizes? In case of the last competition that was around 30€ per winner.

I'm really sorry that you had a bad experience with Nokia.
In my experience the last sponsorship was managed quite good (maemo summit in San Francisco).

I just want to remeber that we still need some volunteers for the next competiton.
I think it would be good the have a official maemo.org PayPal account this time.
It was no problem last time, but I had the impression that many refused to donate some money because of the private nature of my PayPal account.

Thanks.

Well, I think the arrangement was from the beginning that linux foundation pays the trips and their people handle the paper work. I'm not sure how you can bash Nokia for that. Also there was a clear mail who you need to mail about the travel arrangements for approvement and it was certainly not Gil Quim. I got my reply in few days.

I can say it was a bit surprising to see the sharing of rooms but I can cope with that. If you think of it there is probably so many official Nokia and Intel people that one bed rooms have probably went to those people months in advance. Also you wont be sitting in your room too much, just sleeping at nights.

Paying the trips and them paying it back after the proper documents might seem weird. But if you think about it, they can't really push 500-1000 euros to your account and just believe that you are actually buying the tickets with that money, I mean they don't have the time to check if you actually are in the event. And what if you are not, send you an invoice to get the money back?

For the two reasons mentioned above I almost did not leave myself, I thought I'd just take the N900. Not to mention I lose 4 days pay also. I understand the tickets might be hard to bank if you are a student, then it sucks. But I think the system has logic behind it, even if there is a multi million company behind it.

I am now going and hopefully all other guys are too. We should send some pm:s now or when we are there and do some meet and drink some beer

Looking forward to it.

P.S. Suggesting that Nokia/Linux Foundation would not pay the tickets afterward due to your "bad experiences" is just not justified. They are doing the best they can and assigning a lot of people to help us get there and do the arrangements, I would not bash them here. The alternative we would not get anything but the few euros gathered here from maemo.org users pockets.

Yeah and a little later there was a message about them solving the arragements as there were more non europeans as they thought. Then I at least recieved this mail

Once you have looked at airfares, send the
itinerary and cost to xxx xxx (xxx@linuxfoundation.org)
for final approval. Once approved, please go ahead and make your
flight arrangements.

In addition, we're also approving your hotel accommodations for four
nights and will cover room and tax charges only. You need to fill in
your name (as is on your passport) in your preferred shared room as
soon as possible at xxx. The Linux Foundation will pay the room and tax charges to the hotel directly.

So yeah seems I was wrong it was the hotels and flights still from Nokia. I guess you did not get this email from the linux foundation or what?

No. But I got hotel confirmation out of the blue today.

Yeah I got it too. I will pm you the uncencored mail so you get the contact!

Hmm.. I haven't been involved since giving the winners names over, I was hoping everything would be all sorted by now and everyone would be looking forward to their trips/receiving their phones. Sounds like there is a bit of a muddle going on, I hope everything clears up soon for you everyone

Having a quick look at the conference wiki, it seems that sponsorship will come through the Linux Foundation:

I can understand it's awkward for those especially further away to buy their own tickets first, trusting to be reimbursed afterwards. We have winners from Hong Kong and from South America - that's expensive. IMO it seems like the prizes are a workaround using Linux Foundation's existing system, sort of bumping you to the head of the queue rather than straight out sponsorship. I hope this doesn't stop anyone who wants the trip from being able to do so. The consolation is that those who can't make it will get new handsets instead.. so they're still better off as winners atleast. But I'd wish everyone had the chance to decide which option they prefer without any financial pressure...

It's possible but I suspect a lot smaller. When I started the competition it was just gonna be a weekend thing, I put $50 up as a prize but it was mainly for the fun of it. The competition didn't really take off, however, until a bounty collection was established and news of the Nokia prizes was announced. Before that only a few had registered their interest. However I think the comp helped spark some new interest in development and it proved we were serious about running it right, so maybe more would like to get involved in the next one.

Personally I'd love a short competition soon, Im not bothered about prizes I'd enter just for the hell of it I didnt get to take part in this one, hopefully I can in the next one

I'm always happy to volunteer where I can, you only need to ask

As we know from our vantage point behind the scenes there's plenty of lessons we learned the good way and plenty we learned the hard way running this comp. Pleasant surprises and painful lessons. The good news is that means there's plenty of stuff we can do to make the next one even better

That would have been great but I don't think that'll ever happen, remember we waited for that at the start but it was a dead end - we literally waited months on that never materialising Which is why the competition was lucky you stepped in to save the day

I think at the start people were reluctant, heck even I was.. you were just about to head off on holidays to Spain.. with the bounty in your bank account But I think confidence grew with every donation that came in, people became more and more generous and wanted to be involved... it's amazing to think as a community we started with $50 and finished with over $1000

To the winners - I hope you get everything sorted soon and things look clearer for you all. I also hope I get to bump into you all at the conference, it'll be nice to put some faces to the names. Pints are expensive in Dublin but im sure I'll be able to get a round in Although Im not being sponsored ofcourse so maybe you can help poor old me instead! I'd love to get a photo of you all together and that'll be a nice way to finally finish this competition thread/chapter