I was part of the mentorship program for WordCamp Nantes WP Tech and I'd like to share my perspective as well.

While Daniel (whom I was in touch with) is a great guy, I wouldn't agree with the team's motives and the way the event has been prepared.

Name-wise, there have been way too many WordCamps already and all of them are structured as "WordCamp X", where X is a country or a city name. It's not a common practice to add two separate words after the WordCamp name, especially when WP is one of them.

Regarding the local presence, while it's generally the preferred practice (the 80-20 rule), it is still possible to lean to 60-40 or 70-30 in some cases. If the majority of the speakers are not from Nantes, then the question is: is Nantes ready for a WordCamp yet? If the local community or a meetup group is large enough, then it should be easy to find local speakers - otherwise growing the meetup group might be a better idea.

Regarding the costs, I have two general concerns. First off, as Andrea pointed out - there have been public guidelines and each WordCamp organizer has to comply with them. While some are set in stone, others could be recommendations, but paying for speakers in general could cause a number of issues - conflicts with the local community, arguments with the sponsorship money, and so on.

There are plenty of WordCamps held in countries with much, much lower economical standard than France where speakers have been covering their own expenses (not to mention that a lot of us also pay for travels outside of the continent even, and have a personal "travel" fund deducted from our source of income). I wouldn't like to get into politics, but France doesn't strike me as a 3rd world country with outstanding financial problems (especially with the $200 mark mentioned in the post).

I wouldn't mind at all if I didn't have to pay for speaking abroad, but as long as the policy is written as is, we have to comply with it accordingly.

There's nothing wrong with non-WordCamps for sure, but trying to get under the WordCamp name comes with a set of requirements, and that's the price one has to pay in order to join the WordCamp community.