I'm hoping the SHA crowd can give me the benefit of their years of
experience with the SHA conference.

I am putting together a conference session proposal and I've been looking at
the on-line submission page and the other rules
about submitting a session.

As far as I understand it I have to include registration payment from all
the participants with my proposal.
I have a number of conceptual and practical problems with this

1) The term 'proposal' suggests that at the end of this process the session
may not be chosen anyway. As a number of my participants will only be able
to obtain funding to attend the conference on the basis of giving paper,
they will be in the situation of having paid for a conference that they will
not be attending. Is there a mechanism for re-imbursement in this case or am
I misunderstanding the concept of 'proposal'.

2. A number of my particpants are currently carrying out fieldwork in places
such as East Africa and Sri Lanka and will not be able to get payment sorted
by the deadline.

3. Does the on-line submission form expect me to extract credit card details
from my participants as a means of payment- I'm not sure many people will be
happy to supply me (essentially a 3rd party) with such confidential
financial details.

I may be being terribly obtuse about this, but I've never come across such a
bureaucratic mechanism for merely proposing a session- is this a case of
language or nuance being different on this side of the Atlantic. I am also
concerned for purely practical cash flow reasons- some of my participants
are students; whilst they will probably be able to get some form of funding
to cover their conference registration fees etc it seems a bit unfair to ask
them to stump up in advance.

In my experience, the usual procedure would be for the proposer to email the
organisers with a session proposal, that proposal to be accepted, and only
once it was confirmed that the session was accepted would registration be
expected, allowing participants to then seek out grants etc where necessary.

I may have got everything wrong, in which case many apologies, but I think
I've got a jolly good session and I don't want to mess up the proposal
submission

As a York resident I can promise a pint and some inside tips on the best
pubs to anyone can help me navigate the correct procedures

cheers

David
(from a rather wet and rainy York)
---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.692 / Virus Database: 453 - Release Date: 28/05/2004