Hi everyone,
Updates; Website is launched, Venue is announced, booked and paid, Dates are now concrete, Attendance from our featured attendees is confirmed, Wifi arranged, Slow progress is being made with getting a wide bandwidth link in to the venue.
A big thanks to Dan for his help with the website. I launched it today by redirecting drupalsouth.net.nz to http://wellington2010.drupalsouth.net.nz (instead of to christchurch2008.drupalsouth.net.nz), changing some links in some old blog posts and announcements to point there and tweeting the URL.
Also thanks to everyone (I think everyone in the group helpes out with this one) who suggested venues and made phone calls and paid visits to potential venues. I really appreciate your help.
However I really need a lot more support and help from you all to make DrupalSouth awesome! :)
We/I have done the hard work now; getting seed money & initial sponsors, getting the website live, and confirming the venue and dates. But there is still quite a lot to do and I feel like I'm almost alone with it all at the moment.
Most of the remaining tasks are relatively easy and manage-able and don't need necessarily need the task-owners to take on too much responsibility. I took on the project of DrupalSouth Wellington knowing I was taking on a risk and fair bit of responsibility – I'm happy to continue to be responsible for everything. I also knew it would be a lot of work. And I'm happy to take on the full burden of that work if necessary. However DrupalSouth will probably only be "okay" if I do it all. In order for it to be awesome, it needs a bunch of people who want it to be great!
The things that remain to be done and that are easy for people to take ownership of are, roughly in order of priority;
- More sponsorship; Currently we need to have 50 paying attendees at about $70 per person just to break even with no frills. I'd like to get another $1-3k sponsorship in order to have a more comfortable budget, lower the price of the event and include at least one lunch.
- Venue contact; Gail (our contact at Mac's) only works mornings so I'm never able to speak to her on the phone (I'm in Thailand). Email doesn't give us the bandwidth we need to have a real conversation, and when I did speak to her on the phone once I think I pissed her off. It would be great if someone in Wellington who is good at charming people could meet with her, checkout the venue again, develop some rapport, discuss options for lunch, costs, table and seating configurations, bringing our own projector and be our main contact person with her.
- Budgeting; Keep an eye on funds available, forecast income (sponsorship) and expected costs, and most importantly; know how many registrations we need to sell at what price to break even, decide the registration price, and know our financial risk at any point in time if we have a breakdown.
- Marketing; Blog, tweet, blog, call on the phone, blog some more, write media/press releases, set up a better relationship with LCA to see how we can best help each other make our events successful. Make sure every one who is invested in Drupal attending LCA, in NZ or in East coast Aussie knows about DrupalSouth and how it will be worth while for them to come.
- Website; This is now mostly writing more useful content about the venue, accommodation, transport, FAQs, organising session proposals, speaker bios, liases with our feature speakers etc. Publishing the schedule/programme.
- Programme; Find more speakers, get their session ideas, filter out the good ones, put together a schedule / programme for the weekend. Make sure that speakers are organised and not writing slides at DrupalSouth! ;)
- Internet; Find a contact in the NZX building next door who will hook us up to their fibre network, or work on an alternative if that is not possible.
- Extra stuff; name tags/badges, T-shirts, printed programme, signs, schwag
Thanks so much for making Drupal awesome everyone!