Tickets available for PsychoPy workshop next week

Announcements
1

Dear all,

There are some tickets available for our 3-day PsychoPy workshops next week which will be run on US (East coast) time-zone.

Tickets can be purchased here :point_right: https://pavlovia.org/store

If you have any Qs do get in touch!

All the best,
Becca

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Hi Rebecca,

I’m very interested in joining the workshop that will be organized in February. Would it be possible to send me the payment details so that I could ask the finance department to pay for the registration for the workshop?

Thank you very much,

Fred

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Dear Rebecca,

First of all, I really appreciate PsychoPy and all the effort you’ve been putting to make this lovable tool available for everyone for free, and I would love to attend to the event. I also love the fact that Pavlovia is made available at an apparently symbolic price.

While on one hand I love Psychopy, on the other hand your pricing policy is unrealistic for a typical Brazilian Master’s student living on a stipend. For instance, the event you are promoting has a price of £300 which is, in my opinion, very fair for someone living in the US or UK, for instance. But for a student on my situation, living on a stipend of 1500BRL (the standard stipend for Master’s level students in Brazil, converting today as £ 201.75) it would mean 1.5 times my stipend. That means I would have to not live at all for one and a half month to attend to the event.

For the sake of social fairness, I would strongly suggest that you think about localized prices for events or even the use of Pavlovia. While .20 GBP per trial might seem a little bit symbolic for someone in the UK, it’s not “that symbolic” for someone outside where exchange rates are not that favorable and where researchers might not work at the same conditions they do in developed countries. If running a 50 participants might cost “just £10”, " just £10" might lack the “just” for half of the world population. But if you just added another .10 GBP to the price you charge people in the US and UK, for instance, and reduced and average of .10 GBP on the price you charge other countries in situations like ours, it would make little or no difference for people in US and UK, while it would make a world of difference for people in those countries.

That said, I still appreciate all the effort put on building PsychoPy and Pavlovia and that means a lot. I am just calling your attention to a problem that might keep limiting science to the developed countries (the very opposite of what Open Science means).

Best regards,
Bruno Moreira-Guedes

3 Likes
4

Hi Bruno,

Thanks for reaching out. I am pleased that you are finding PsychoPy and Pavlovia useful tools in your research.
We do understand your issue and we have always tried very hard to provide resources for people of with a range of resources available to them and in all countries, which is why most of our work is made available freely (PsychoPy, and sharing/sourcing studies on pavlovia).

Sadly, some of the services we provide (such as hosting of experiments and running of workshops) have direct costs to us, especially in the payment of salaries, and those costs come to us in GBP. While we are not trying to make profits, we need to charge a sum for those services that makes them sustainable. Yes, we could charge a lower price to people that had less money but determining that would be extremely complicated. Not only are some countries less wealthy that others, some institutions within a country are less wealthy and some individuals also.

Our solution, so far, is to provide our paid services at a single fixed price, but also to provide free services to as many people as possible (actually, our paid services enable us to expand and enhance our free services!). In this case, although you may not be able to attend the intensive 3-day workshops there is still a huge amount of training material available for you freely on the internet. This includes:

  1. All of the material that we cover in our three day courses Building better experiments with — Workshops for PsychoPy 2020 2020
  2. Our youtube channel – where we also aim to discuss most of what we cover in our workshops (I joined the team as staff in September, and have been working on this)
  3. More regular ‘open’ 3-hour sessions that are completely free (you can get on the mailing list for these here PsychoPy workshops waiting list or keep an eye out for events here Creating Experiments in PsychoPy (3 hours) — Workshops for PsychoPy 2020 2020 ).

Indeed, the revenue generated by those items we charge for do have benefits for all users. As one example, without the revenue generated from workshops and pavlovia, the team would likely have not been able to employ me to expand the free materials/workshops or the developers that now work full time on the project.

Sorry that we haven’t found a way yet to calculate a fairer per-customer calculation of price but we hope to keep providing you with tools that are considerably cheaper than any competing option, as well as free materials for all.

I hope that you can understand,
Becca