Geeks in Boston

I didn’t get to post here during BarCamp Boston 2 due to an extremely badly timed server crash. But for those curious about our finances, here’s a Google spreadsheet with the full BarCamp Boston account ledger:

BarCamp Boston Ledger (published on Google Spreadsheets)

About 200 people came to BarCamp over the course of the weekend. (Peak attendance was about 170 on Saturday and 90 on Sunday.) I still need expense info from some of the organizers, but here’s the executive summary
(including some estimated expenses):

• Sponsor income: $3950
  • 15 sponsors at $200
  • 1 sponsor at $250
  • 2 sponsors at $350
• Donation income: $701.24
  • About half in cash at the event and half by credit card.
  • 15 credit card donors; we didn’t track cash donors.
• Cost of T-shirts, supplies, contest prizes, etc: $1812.78
• Cost of food: $1906.51
  • Saturday Breakfast: $154.56 (some costs may be missing, but
    breakfast was very lightly attended due to weather)
  • Saturday Lunch: $548.30
  • Sunday Breakfast: $343.82
  • Sunday Lunch: $402.29
  • Snacks both days: $163.33
  • Drinks both days: $294.21
• Total Revenue: $4651.24
• Total Costs: $3719.29
• Final “Profit”: $931.35

Some observations:

• We initially expected to raise about $6000. The main reason we didn’t meet this expectation is that we didn’t get any mega-sponsors: nobody gave $1000 or more. I’m actually really happy that we were able to finance the event using a large number of small sponsors, because these sponsors are usually individuals or small companies that want to support and participate in BarCamp. This bodes well for the viability of future BarCamps. However, things would have felt a lot more comfortable if some rich companies had written us a bigger check or two. Perhaps some of the sponsors will become richer and/or more generous by next time.
• The $931.35 could probably have paid for a frugal dinner on Saturday. But we made the call to skip dinner for two reasons. First, we didn’t have anything organized, and the straightforward option — pizza — was already chosen for both lunches. Second, a large chunk of sponsorships and donations — about $600 — wasn’t received until after the conference. Perhaps if we had better forecasted this income, we could have done a simple dinner or maybe even a crowd-organization incentive, like a $7 rebate to anyone eating dinner at BarCamp.
• Even though I was tired and stressed from a server crash and air travel delays that kept me away from BarCamp until Saturday afternoon, BarCamp totally rocked!

I’m in sunny Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive. I’m also taking part in some associated BarCamp events. Right now I’m at Bourbon Rocks on 6th St, which is a bar currently serving as the venue for BarCamp Austin. The logo for the event plays this up: it’s an Armadillo drinking a bottle of one-star liquor. And next week there’ll be the BarCamp Planners Summit, where I’ll get to work on some essays and discussions with other BarCamp planners from around the world.

BarCamp Austin is unusual not only for its venue. Most of the people here are moving between BarCamp and South by Southwest, the vast commercial conference two blocks away. One person I talked to pointed out that this sabotages the intensely local nature of most BarCamps; there are lots of dabblers and listeners-in here, and the likelihood they’ll bump into each other again and start working together is low. On the other hand, there’s a different and smaller crowd here, a subset of SXSW consisting of people who have participated in BarCamps and care about them. We just had a spirited discussion about Coworking and there is a “state of wordpress” talk coming up soon. The talks have been a little more focused, and potentially more concrete, than the panels at SXSW which often cover broad topics in broad strokes.