I was involved in the planning of 7 BarCamps last year. 3 in China and
4 in Germany. For the German camps we have decided to make it not
transparent to everyone for various reasons.

Our deal was the following:

- The amount of donation was free
- All sponsors, big or small were treated the same
- The sponsors had no right to influence the event
- There was no minimum, but the average was between 500€ - 1000€
- We never touched money, like Crystal proposed it in her "Ten steps
to organizing a BarCamp". All bills were paid directly from a sponsor
to caterers, t-shirt printers, any rentals. None of our own company
books were ever involved.

As there is no "sponsoring culture" in Germany and as it was hard to
find sponsors in the beginning, some companies garantueed us a certain
amount, which we reduced with the donations of other sponsors. That
worked very well. It gave us the neccessary finacial security to order
shirts, food and what else is needed for a BarCamp.

Most of the sponsors, big or small, were participating with very
interesting sessions, none of them ever tried to make it a sales show
for their products and/or services.

Reasons why we didn't make it public to everyone are:

1. Most companies do not want that the amount of their donations are
made public.

2. We have been attacked by German bloggers  for being sponsored by
companies that are blamed for making business in China. Not more than
allegations and unverified (the same companies sponsored in the USA
btw.) But these bloggers are loud and have a wide reach. They publish
incorrect details and they play the racist/human rights card. It is
impossible to debate with them. I tried and it resulted in deletion of
my comments.

3. In Germany no one talks about money/income etc. It is a cultural
taboo.

We never had problems to communicate the amount of the donations to
anybody, we just haven't made them public on a website. I have checked
the wikis of some countries (not all of course) and as far as I can
see, none of them exercises the financial openess as in the US. It is
just not common here.

We are quite comfortable with that system. I can of course only speak
for the BarCamps I was involved. But I exchanged experiences with
other organizers in Germany and as far as I know, others here used
that system too.

We have run bigger BarCamps here and as we were calculating top down,
we wouldn't have been able to finance them with the sponsors we had
and a 300 € limit.