drupal association

Drupalcamp and Drupal meetup Organizers at Drupalcon!

Jacob Redding — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:42:18 +0000

Do you want to a Drupalcamp in your town? How about having a nice Drupal meetup group?
If you have been curious what it takes to run a Drupalcamp, Code sprint, Drupal Jam, or Meetup come join us at Drupalcon D.C March 4th to 7th. Currently there are 3 sessions proposed for the conference that are designed specifically for current and future Drupalcamp and meetup organizers.

Drupalcamp Howto and Q & A
In this session the focus is on what it takes to create a Drupalcamp in your town. Answer questions such as:
What are the costs?
What are the risks?
How do I get people to attend
Who will present?
A panel of experienced Drupalcamp organizer will be on hand to answer any additional questions you have as well as to talk about their experiences and useful tips n' tricks.

Build a Drupalcamp Site
Once you have a Drupalcamp organized you might need a good site for it (if the barcamp.org WIKI isn't working out for you). Attend this session to find out what it takes to make a good Drupalcamp website.

B.O.F Drupal meetup organizers
Maybe a camp isn't quite your deal and you'd rather focus on the monthly meetings that get communities together. Come join other Drupal meetup organizer to discuss what you are doing or what you'd like to do. Learn the tips and tricks from those that have been organizing successful groups.

Drupalcon pricing structure

Jacob Redding — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:17:28 +0000

Drupalcon North America has been announced and will be held in Washington D.C from August 4th to the 7th, 2009. Ticket prices have been announced as well as the ticketing scheme. Frequent Drupalcon goers probably noticed something new at Drupalcon Szeged, a tiered pricing scheme. In Szeged we started ticket prices out at 80 Euros and incrementally raised them to 250 Euros on the day of. In Szeged this was based on timeframe. Tickets purchased in June were priced at 80 Euro, a month later prices raised to 125 euros and so on until the day of the conference.

In D.C we did something similar but based this time it is based on actual ticket sales.

first 100 @ 125 USD
next 300 @ 175 USD
next 400 @ 200 USD
all others @ 250 USD

Why?
We introduced pricing schemes for Drupalcon Szeged as a direct result of Drupalcon Boston. In Drupalcon Boston we had expected 600 people to show up but just a month before the conference we barely had 400 paid registrants although 1,000s had registered online. This presented the Boston team with a real challenge as they were facing several hundred thousand dollars in costs. The Boston team had to make a lot of decisions, should they scale back? push people to buy tickets? do more marketing? What?

Scaling back is not an easy option when you are facing fixed costs such as the rent of a conference center, projectors, audio equipment, Internet, WiFi, etc. Without getting into the gory details of fixed vs variable costs (for the curious they are outlined here) lets just say that Drupalcon Boston was staring down a decent sized loss. Fortunately the Drupal community is awesome. In the last few weeks leading up to Drupalcon Boston ticket sales started to surge. Sales hit 600 tickets. Another 100 tickets were made available and those were quickly snatched up. The doors were shut but people still kept asking. Eventually the conference ended just over 900 people.

So what's the problem with this?

The Boston Drupalcon team was sweating bullets when sales has slumped and only a few hundred had confirmed their presence by purchasing a ticket. Several costs are variable, such as T-Shirts, lunch boxes, etc. but they require several weeks advanced notice. At Boston they were adding people by the tens just days before the event; which is simply not enough time to handle the extra load or keep the variable costs under control.

This is why the tiered pricing scheme was introduced at Drupalcon Szeged. The attempt was to get people to buy their tickets early which provides us with two items

Cash Flow
Accurate attendance numbers

Cash flow
Cash flow is an extremely important item to manage in a conference of this size. The conference venue is over $30k USD and they require cash up front. There are also expenses for Internet connectivity, catering, audio gear, etc. etc. all adding up to nearly $200k USD. Unfortunately these people don't wait until the conference starts to get paid, they want their money as soon as they can get it. The conference thus then relies on the money from tickets to help cover these costs to the best of its ability. The sooner we get the cash from ticket sales the sooner we can pay the suppliers and the less sweat and hair we loose.

Attendance numbers
Holding a conference for 400 people or a conference for 1,000 people changes a lot more than costs. The dynamic changes as well as the logistical challenges. In some respect the tiered pricing scheme worked very well for us in Szeged as it allowed the team to adjust the venue for the number of people. We originally expected 900 people in Hungary but ended up with just over 500. We saw a huge surge in ticket prices at the beginning and then a sharp taper off of sales. Although there was a bit more ticket sales towards the end the team was able to get a fairly firm grasp on the fact that we were not getting the 900 we expected and they adjusted items for 500 attendees.

Wrapping up
The entire purpose of the tiered pricing structure is to get cash in the door as soon as possible and to determine the audience size. If your considering attending Drupalcon please buy your ticket early. This way we can count your attendance and be prepared for your presence. Also this is not the only we way we are encouraging people to buy their tickets early. This year we started marketing earlier and also lined up a few presentations before the site launched. We also have a few other tricks up the sleeve.

Chaotic Drupal Association?

Jacob Redding — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:20:21 +0000

Over a month ago I applied to be on the board of the Drupal association. Since being introduced to Drupal by the good folks at Openflows, while I was working at MNN, I have become heavily involved in the community. I have always been a big fan of OSS but watching the Drupal community interact is absolutely amazing. The more I watch(ed) the interaction the more I want(ed) to be involved.

When I lived in NYC I helped hold the monthly meetups and helped out with the Drupalcamps. I simply wanted people to get together to exchange knowledge, build a network and, most of all, get involved in their community. People told me that I was good at the organizing thing so I decided to go ahead and apply for an event organization position.

I'm not sure if the current members of the board read my application but it clearly states that I'm all for chaos. I love chaos, no I heart chaos. To be fair I did say "Organized Chaos" but its still chaos nonetheless. I don't think the association should impose or even attempt to place structure on the camps, meetups, cons, etc. People should do whatever the heck they want to do.

Well they voted and I got in. In fact I didn't just make it into a permanent member position I made it all the way into the board. They voted chaos onto the board. Wackos!

Its been about a week now and the one thing I can really say about this board and the elections is this: In an election one might normally say "I will fight for this or that". There is absolutely no fighting on this board despite there being disagreements. Everyone on this board has an ability to hear the different sides of an argument and work together for the betterment of the community. Its actually quite amazing.

I'm excited to work with these people!

Now getting back to my application and this idea of chaos you might ask "well what are you doing then"? In a nutshell I am going to do my best to provide the resources so that you can create your own meetup, your own camp, your own ????. Who knows what that is. I will not, however, tell you what to do. You run the meetups, camps, etc. its your show and you get to do it however you want. I'm just a guide.

The chaos comes from having no cookie cutter mold. We're not setting up a DrupalCamp franchise and you can't have fries with that. Drupal is what you make of it but if you need some guidance I'll do what I can to help you myself or get you in touch with those that can.

I'm excited to work with people like Robert Garrigos (of awesome DrupalCon Barcelona fame) whom applied but then revoked his application so that I would have a better chance. Honestly I think he was a better choice but I digress. I know him and I will work together on a lot of things and I'm excited to see what he does this year.
I'm excited to work with some great folks in the Philippines, China, Spain, France, Switzerland and, of course, throughout the U.S. Those are only the countries with Drupalers that I'm currently speaking with. I can't wait to work for that that I haven't spoken with yet.

2008 is going to incredibly exciting with a lot of great changes coming to Drupal. I hope to add my tiny part to the massive Drupal community.