Moving from a Camp to a Con: Mistakes We Knew We Were Making
Submitted by amye on July 8, 2009 - 22:57
Your session in a few words:
Events: Moving from a Camp to a Con
Track:
Extra credit
Session Type:
Lecture
Level of expertise:
Beginner
Language:
English In October 2008, O'Reilly Media announced that their flagship open source convention, OSCON, was moving from Portland, OR to San Jose, CA. The Portland Open Source community had a giant hole in their hearts, so they got together and made their own all-volunteer run conference.
Open Source Bridge 2009 was held June 17-19, after months of planning, a few disasters and hard work.
This is a tale of event logistics, volunteer management, sponsor wrangling, contract negotiation and some really useful resources. They will be even more useful as our open source community events get bigger and bigger. BarCamp-style unconference events are glorious fun.
Add an order of magnitude more fun for a Conference, but also an order of magnitude more work.
Will this session will cover organizing meetups and camps?
Or just conferences? If not I'd like to see one for user groups and regional camps [edit-- in between starting to write this comment I submitted a general community building session. Don't want to step on the toes of this one though.]
Organizing Camps and Meetups
Absolutely.
A lot of the same principles apply for all three 'types'.
You have to walk before you can run, so user group meetups, and regional camps implement a lot of this, just on smaller scales.