(Notes by John  Eckman - please update/correct/add - I started scribing late and rushed to keep up).

 

 

Shimon Rura (BarCamp Boston) and Darius Kazemi (Boston Post-Mortem)

 

What is large? Over 100, over 50? Depends on context.

 

Venues

Get free venues - call around. People are stuck in small spaces at universities because they haven’t called around.

 

Maintaining the small group culture / balance of group between newbies and professionals, etc.

 

People who attend user groups are cheap bastards - need a sponsor or a free venue

 

Paying speakers to come - generally not something favored. Use dopplr, pay attention to local conferences, see who will be in town anyway. Offer the event as a chance to practice.

 

Boston Post Mortem - 200 people in each month’s meeting, 700+ mailing list. Meets at Skelling in Waltham

 

Sponsors - control how much time they get to speak - 5 minutes, maybe a few slides in the beginning, logo in an email.

 

Sponsor model - annual (throughout the year), food, specific items.

 

Or have sponsors per event -

 

But don’t be afraid to not have sponsors either. BCS history - died because it ran out of money. Would the group exist without the income. If the income becomes more important than the group, the group dies.

Some groups try to stay out of sponsorship (avoid suspicion of poaching/recruiting, avoid undue influence). Use volunteers - spread the effort across multiple volunteers, rotate roles, give lots of small tasks to different people. ie, one to book venue, one to line up speaker, one to do announcements, one to coordinate sponsors, etc.

 

Regular schedule, regular venue, same time, every month, always having a speaker. (If that meant one of the organizers had to give a talk they did so).

 

(Windows Boston) Loadfest example - documented, well established timeline. 4 weeks in advance here’s what happens, 2 weeks in advance here’s what needs to happen, the day before, etc - shares this knowledge across the broader group, helps make it possible to let other people volunteer.

 

Crossover with other groups? Sometimes with mixed success. Boston Post-Mortem has done this but different group size can be a challenge - big groups mixing with small groups.

 

Balance between being on the T and having good parking - some folks will complain about not being T accessible or people will complain about cost of parking.

 

QA / Topics

- Email management and mailing lists - Pecha Kucha has over 1000.

- Record or not

- 501(c)3

- Volunteer turnover / new people

- schedule conflicts / events

- speaker cancellations

- liability insurance

 

BarCamp organizing - all done on an open mailing list. What works well? Create interesting projects and then enable people to participate. The reliable size of the organizing group has grown steadily - in fact even more than the growth rate of the group as a whole. Make it possible for people to volunteer in small bits.

WindowsBoston - try not to overload any one volunteer - give ‘em four, maybe five hours a month of effort.

 

Props for BarCamp Boston.

 

Basic approach: a few months before the event, we start some discussion on the mailing list - generally starts

with possible dates and venues. First step is date and venue, then start looking for sponsors, with a kind of expected attendance. Then we schedule an organizers meeting (about 8-15 people show up) and start breaking down what needs to happen - food coordination, programming contest, logo, web page, t-shirts, sponsor-coordinating, each organizing volunteer sort of drives what they think is important. As we get closer there are a few more organizer meetings, sometimes smaller.

 

Eventbrite - also a good option to do registration and badge printing, etc.

 

BPM - actively conscript volunteers - be enthusiastic. Both time and space continuation are important - if you cant get the same space use the same time. But the model is exception handling - try, as much as possible, to be in the same place at the same time. Always send a reminder email - exactly one week before, exactly one day before - the point is to be regular.

 

WindowsBoston - the problem is not getting enough speakers but having too many - we’re booked out till January.

 

Schedule out several meetings in advance - have the next ~6 months planned.

 

BCB - just a dba in Shimon’s name. So far ignoring all those problems has worked for us.

Shimon walked through the BCB ledger.

 

June 4 2006 - started to track the first BarCamp.   Sponsor Wrangling - definitely a role that is important.

(Sometimes the same folks over time).

 

Free T-Shirts at every event - first day, priority for T-Shirts goes to those who have donated. $1900 in cash raised at the event. 50-70% of the donations are that day. (This includes people who paid that day).

It could be more expensive. BarCamp aesthetic is very low-fi. Low production value, high content value. 

 

Started the year with $3500 in the bank, post BarCamp Boston we have maybe $5000.

 

Price of pizza - lots of discussion here. Negotiate with the venue. Beauty’s Pizza. If you’re ordering over $1000 of pizza, you should plan to get 10-20% discount. Get the pizza cut into 12 slices not 8, makes it spread further. Half a pizza per adult (or so)

 

Venue was $1500.

 

In trying to get things free, deal with the biggest costs - venue, food, t-shirts.

 

Didn’t get a deep discount on t-shirts - 300 tshirts was like $2900. You can tweak this up or down, like $2000, based on how much money you have.  We ordered women’s shirts this year.

 

JakPrints (Tshirts vendor). Every year.

 

Color differentiate shirts for volunteers, attendees, sponsors - give you sponsors some love.

LandsEnd, you can embroider just one shirt - so you can make nice embroidered golf shirts for the premiere sponsors.

If you don’t have an EIN, in many cases, get the sponsor to pay the venue, vendor directly - keep the cash out of your hands.

 

T-shirts seem to always be the last thing completed - they always arrive like the day before the event. We also always talk about doing something more fancy, preprinting names, etc - but we end up going back to JakPrints.

Recording events - get students from local film/video schools to come record events. Reach out to career counselors and ask for a motivated student who might like to do it. (These are folks who are actually interested in the topic preferrably but they get samples for their reel, etc).

 

Email lists - Boston User Groups has an email list server, many use listserv, or mailman. MadMimi - free until you get to 250. Some of the $7/mnth things aren’t bad. Many of your cheap shared hosting providers come with free listserv type things.

 

Constant Contact and similar vendors can help (Gamodyne mailer gets a mention too) - manage bounces, manage sensing of formats, make your emails look nice, etc.

 

Have an “announce” list which is low volume as well as more active “discussion” and “tech tips” list. BCB uses

Yahoo Groups - just has one which is really an organizers list. Campaign Monitor - used to blast out announcements for the event itself.

 

BPM started a blog a few years back - that also drives lots of traffic. Twitter is also very effective - FB announcements was less effective.

 

Liability - BPM relies on the larger professional organization. Many folks are worried about this - if you’ve “sponsored” the beer, and someone gets in a car accident, you can be named in the lawsuit.

 

The goal is to avoid liability, but as a recognized organization, you basically get exposed to liability.

Options: don’t serve alcohol, which can greatly reduce liability, or have it in a bar but ask people to pay for alcohol. As a large organization, you can start to attract these kinds of issues.