Posted by dries on May 8, 2006 at 2:28pm
As Boris mentioned, I won’t be able to take a lead in organizing this year’s European DrupalCON.
What’s more important than a particular focus, schedule or venue, is finding two or more people who will be the official conference organizers. Without some people “pushing the cart”, it will be very difficult to move forward.
In short: the first task is to find people willing to organize this DrupalCON and to make them the “official organizers”.
(If necessary we can reward the organizers? They get to be a sponsor of the conference (free advertising)? Or we could ask attendees to pay a modest fee which would go directly to the organizers? Just thinking up loud.)
Update by Dries: people that offered to help so far: Mixel, DriesK, Bally, Boris.
Comments
Drupal.be posting
I posted a news item at http://drupal.be/ to invite those interested in organizing a Drupal conference in Brussels. The only way to find people willing to help, and people who actually know Brussels, is to let people know we are looking for help ... if we want to see this happen, we should do some handwaving and get things rolling.
Bryght will be helping to organize
That will include at the very least myself and Roland, plus the help of our intern over the summer.
What we will need help with is one or more people on the ground to help out.
Awesome!
That's great, Boris! Thanks. Let's try and find some Belgians to help.
Yup, I will help too
Venue (which requires person on ground) is #1 and then the usual Con stuff. I love Dries's idea of no limits, some coding rooms, some presentation rooms and BarCamp type scheduling
I'll be there
I've put it in my calendar. I'll naturally be willing to give a hand when there.
I'm not sure how much I can help organize from Denmark, but I'm trying to organize a danish or perhaps even nordic group to go together.
My focus is my newfound freedom as a free agent type consultant, so ...
I'll be willing to give a presentation on information architecture - interaction design etc, or organizing a "workshop" like thingie....
Gunnar Langemark
Denmark
Mixel
I had a meeting with Mixel last night. He works in Brussels and would be willing to help.
yup
Well I think the first task for me is to find our options for the location etc.
I never helped organizing a confrerence before, this is going to be fun. I will go and talk to the people who are used of creating conferences in Brussels, they should be able to give us information on it.
oops, posted my above comment before i saw your comment
welcome!
2 registrations now
well I had a drupal.org registration, strange I had to make another one for the groups. I did read somthing of using other registration, but probaly din't realy understood it. Well any way, I'm on it now
great, just need Mixel to subscribe to this group!
and then we can proceed!
A helping hand
I might be able to help; I work in Brussels and live near Brussels (Leuven)
I have never organised something like this before; so I have no idea how to handle this; but together with some other enthousiastic people, I'm sure we can make this a succes.
great
Don't worry about how to handel it, I have seen it so many times and feel convidence for taking a leading role this time. Do you have some interesting contacts who would be relevant for now? What exactly would you like to help with, just give some ideas.
BarCamp Brussels
Bally, are you going to attend BarCamp Brussels? I'll be there, and from what I'm told, Mixel will attend as well. That would be a good time to brainstorm some more, and to share all the information that has been collected by then.
BarCamp Brussels - OK
Yes, I'll be there (Jo Wouters = Ballie)
Let's meet, and check out how we are going to handle this.
exactly
just added the topic to the barcamp wiki.
will be about knowledge sharing
Just added our knosos as topic to the barcamp wiki. I have made a group on the knowledge sharing here as well, hope to get more interaction on our sprint (the development an research we did in the last 4 months) and see how we get it back to Drupal community.
It would also be my first barcamp, so I will get an nice idea of our needs for Drupalcon. Looking forward to meet some more of you folks ;)
starting
It will be important to have place fitting our purpose (see task2). So we need a large place for some more general presentations but at the same time we need smaller rooms for BarCamp style work. Now I have several contacts in Brussels that are used to organise stuff and I did a lot of conferences here, its nice to be part of the organisation (till now I only stood next to it). I know some places that would be interesting and will get more information about it soon.
In particular I was thinking of the university, the conference will be during the holidays and the rooms will be available. Another interesting path would be to get into all the conference rooms they mostly use for EU-conferences. Now there are other ogranizations in Brussels I will go to in the next week to get information. Maybe I get some non profit organizations (who are specialised in creating conferences) involved, we will see. Of course non of it will be free and it will be important to know how many people we expect and the budget we have for it.
Lets get practical, can any of you give a estimation of how many people we expect? I shall look into hotel opportunities as well as eating&drinking, is there anything I'm missing?
September is not so far away, so do forgive me for putting some pressure behind it. I just like to work with 1 motto: if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing properly. I hope to get most of the practical aspects decided against the end of the month. We should give people enough time for registration, plan their trip and get self-organised (for the BarCamp part). Also there should be enough people on the ground, so anyone close to Brussels who is willing to help, great ! I would like to make a separation here; if there are people with contacts in Brussels to "make stuff move" we should start interacting now. For all those who live close to Brussels and would like to help out when it gets practical (that would be a few days before the conference an during the conference) do let me know.
100?
It depends on how soon we start marketing our efforts, and how much interest we can generate for this kind of conference. It's hard to say how many people will attend, but I estimate that we need room for about 100 people. We should probably plan for 100-150 people though. Ideally, we'd have a venue where we can rent more rooms/space as needed so we can adjust things dynamically.
As for the budget, we'll figure that out and try to get some sponsors on board. The past conferences that I helped organize, we had a $3.000-4.000 USD budget to organize a 2-3 day conference. That money went to (i) renting the venue, (ii) coffee, water and other refreshments, (iii) renting whiteboards and projectors, (iv) internet access and (v) Drupal t-shirts.
Boris et al., correct me if I'm wrong or if you have different estimated. Thanks!
very good
Thanks for the info. 100 people is way less than I had in mind and in walking distance of the OSCON (didn't look up where it was) makes the two locations I had in mind bad candidates, o well, when it gets bigger in some years I know some good places ;)
Also thanks for an estimation on the bugert, I got enoug information to start working.
I have a practical question, having the congress close to OSCON, is to make people swap between the conference sessions to the other conference, right? But this means the hotel accommodation is mostly taken care of no? Just to get a clear view on how the relation between the conferences will be, it can have influence on the organisation.