First of all I would like to congratulate you all with the website and the communication around your event. I got very interested and as any drupalcamp I was looking at the price and I was a bit blown away..
This is the first Drupalcamp I have seen that asks for prices that are higher than a Drupalcon compared in dimension.
As a student but being a fan of Drupal since quite some years I have some questions/remarks on this event.
Can you please justify this price on your website towards people so they know what they pay for. I can imagine that someone that wants to find out about Drupal might be very scared when seeing this event. And if that person is comparing this with another Drupalcamp and suddenly sees it's free but still it is able to offer free food this person will possibly feel that something is not justified. Personally I'm afraid that the balance is a bit lost and yet we are still using that same name.
If you really want to charge high prices, please give it a different name and promote it as a non-community event because I feel a bit excluded now. Even with those community prices.
Don't feel attacked by this, this is written with a lot of questions and concerns from me personally in protecting the 'free' spirit and it's monetary value that we should pay for having 2 days of fun.
Comments
Just to give this a bit more
Just to give this a bit more power :
Quoted from http://drupal.org/node/247972
"Expenses
Keep the costs low. This is not fancy. You’re not holding a big conference. If you keep the costs low, you can make the camps sustainable. A sustainable series of camps is much better than one big gala event. Keep the admission free if you can.
Camps are generally free events put on by the community. Participants get in for free. How?
The key is bringing in donations. Donated food. Donated space. Look for these resources in your community."
I think this probably
I think this probably deserves a reply from one of the organizers. I'm sure the fees are a reflection of the expenses involved with organizing the camp, but you can always argue about what level of business orientation a camp should have. To be fair, Drupal community members are given a substantial rebate, especially for the second, community-oriented day. Perhaps an open discussion about the camp before the fact would have been good a thing. I'm not complaining though, as I'm not doing any of the work involved with arranging the event.
/ Hannes Lilljequist – SthlmConnection
I agree that the fees could
I agree that the fees could account for a big part in the training course but than it should be much more clear that there is 1 day of drupalcamp and 1 pre-day of training like what happens in Drupalcon. I believe that the way it is adverted now is a deception and misusing the name Drupalcamp the way it was intended and explained in the link above from d.o.
Ofcourse I'm open for discussion
I'm very hesitant to complain
I'm very hesitant to complain about this since everyone in the Swedish Drupal community greatly benefit from the increased Drupal awareness that the event creates and the organizers have certainly done more to promote Drupal that I have.
That said, as far as I can tell it's a NodeOne venture and it at least appears to be a for-profit affair, so perhaps calling it a DrupalCamp is not ideal. If nothing else it creates a naming problem if someone else wants to put together something more in line with the camp guidelines at http://drupal.org/node/247972.
Expenses Keep the costs low.
Expenses
Keep the costs low. This is not fancy. You’re not holding a big conference. If you keep the costs low, you can make the camps sustainable. A sustainable series of camps is much better than one big gala event. Keep the admission free if you can.
http://dgtlmoon.com
Just a few notes
I know Jakob is putting together a reply to this, and I don't want to forego anything of what he wants to say.
What I can say right now is that (1) there is a comment from NodeOne in progress and (2) the plan for the conference has never – as far as I know – been to make money from NodeOne.
Nevertheless I think this is a good discussion. Thanks for raising it.
//Johan Falk
Even low key costs
As one of the more frequent conference organizers in Sweden with Disruptive Media conference, Disruptive Code and Disruptive Change, I can certify that even low key conferences cost to organize. There's a lack of good (aka cost efficient) venues in Stockholm with good internet/wifi and at most venues you are not allowed to choose your own caterer for food, you can only use the venue's caterer and they don't come cheap. If you are more than 40 people, you need conference tech which is 20-30 thousand a day and so forth.
If you think Drupal camp should be free, I suggest you help the organizers with corporate sponsors apart from NodeOne, or organize your own Drupalcamp later this year.
I know nothing about the
I know nothing about the business side of organizing these things in Stockholm or elsewhere, but judging from the camp guidelines and past camps around the world (e.g. NYC, LA, Copenhagen), a camp is typically held at a university or library and WiFi may or may not be present. The goal is to keep it free or very low cost and do what you can with it.
The Stockholm camp is held in a pretty ritzy venue and since there is a lot of focus on showcasing Drupal for potential clients it probably needs to be. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, in fact I think it's great in its own way and good for growing Drupal mindshare. But the name itself sets a very different expectation for those familiar with the camp concept. If it was called "Drupal Days Stockholm" or whatever I don't think we would be having this discussion.
That is exactly my point
That is exactly my point henrrrik! I don't care how much it costs or whatever you do but using the Drupalcamp name is just not right for this kind of event. If you are even a little bit conscious about following the guidelines you can see that there is a conflict of interest. And it is is in the importance of our neutrality that private and community events should be separated.
Drupalcamps should be open to everyone interested when we follow the guidelines. You cannot permit yourself to exclude students or ambitious newcomers in a Drupalcamp.
Like I said before and henrrrik conforms : give the first day another name and your problem is solved..
First of all, thank you all
First of all, thank you all for your valuable input. It seems to boil down to the fact that the prices aren't the problem but the name used for the event. As Nick says, and also others have commented on, the word DrupalCamp makes you think of something different than this.
We are aware of this and have tried to make an event that is for the community in the traditional sense as well as for others. For this reason we've made sure the second day can safely be considered a DrupalCamp in the traditional sense. Though the truth is that both days are community-oriented, but at different parts of the community.
Day one has a clear focus on application and use and is aimed at practitioners. They aren't always interested in Drupal as such and are pragmatic: "what use is it to me?". They don't do Drupal in their daily work and wouldn't attend a conference on a university campus on a Saturday. Practitioners can be seen in contrast to enthusiasts who most of us count ourselves among. Enthusiasts like us don't mind spending weekends talking Drupal on a university campus that's a bit hard to reach. The Saturday is for us, and the content this day has been hand-picked to be of interest to enthusiasts.
So in order to make this event accessible to the practitioners we've been restricted in what kind of venue we could find. We've had to go with a venue offering higher standards, and which is easily accessible. This has meant that we cannot go with the cheapest option. We've had to come up with a compromise to ensure the conference has something for everyone. It means that enthusiasts get access to the same venue, but for a much lower price thanks to a targeted discount. In effect the practitioners are sponsoring the event for the enthusiasts.
There are many considerations to be made when you organize an event like this. This is but one of many. I understand that some may be disappointed with the prices. But I hope you understand that we've done our best to make an event that is available to as many as possible.
I've written a blog post about the event organizing process:
http://nodeone.se/blogg/organizing-a-drupalcamp-%E2%80%93-a-short-how-to
Jakob Persson – Leancept – Results-only digital and marketing consultants – Personal blog
Thanks for the collective
Thanks for the collective answer on the concerns regarding the name of this conference. I hope that next time you try to separate the event even more or give it another name so it matches the opinion of the majority. The argument that is given in some answers about the audience makes perfect sense but nonetheless giving it another (maybe similar?) name doesn't change the targeted group. And it seemed that this was one of the major pilars of this conference as explained in nodeone's blogpost. Probably this kind of audience doesn't even care about the name?
Anyone, for me this is closed and I'd like to thank everyone for not making a flame-war out of this, since that is not constructive at all :-) Go Drupal Community! And keep it up with those great events.
Conference vs. unconference
I've only attended one DrupalCamp and one BarCamp.
The DrupalCamp happens to be (the second day of) the first DrupalCamp in Sweden organized by Dataföreningen and NodeOne in 2009. It was similar to the 3rd one we're discussing here. The first day was business oriented on a Friday and the second one was community oriented on a Saturday. I didn't think about the missing "camp" part (as in BarCamp) probably because there hadn't been any BarCamp in Sweden.
Actually there still hasn't been any BarCamp in Sweden (as far as I know) and the whole unconference concept is still quite unknown. There was an article about it just a month ago in one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden talking about unconference being the conference of the future.
The BarCamp I've attended was the biggest BarCamp in the world, BarCamp Yangon 2011. Like the first Swedish DrupalCamp it was an awesome event, but obviously very different. DrupalCamp Sweden was (and still is) a conference, BarCamp Yangon was an unconference.
I hope we will see BarCamps in Sweden too some day and I hope that NodeOne will continue organizing awesome conferences. Once people realize what a "camp" is I believe it will only be used in names of unconferences. And the Swedish Drupal conferences will be called something else.
For now, I don't think the name matters much, except that it is misleading to people outside of Sweden.
/Adam