What I learned by helping to plan BarCampSeattle

The second annual BarCampSeattle was held this weekend at the Adobe Center in Fremont. I was a member of this years planning board and also the MC for the event and I decided that I wanted to share my postmortem notes publicly in the spirit of BarCamp.

1. Getting sponsors in a down economy is tough.

We had really great sponsors this year, but we found it really tough to find people who would be wiling to donate in-kind or pass money directly to vendors. We didn’t have shirts or stickers for this reason alone.  Because we don’t have a organizational structure we can’t really keep a bank account for expenses.  We may have to form a non-profit to get over this hurdle.   It seemed like with many sponsors if we went to them and said we want a grand for item X and they could write a check they were down. When we asked them to take a step beyond it made it a lot harder to secure the funding. Some of this was the economy some of this is the nature of the beast.

2. Event promotion is a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?

Next year we need a promotion plan. Outside of twitter and FaceBook we did almost no promotion. We really needed to leverage our social circles more and push through the local tech blogs, Upcoming, and what ever other medium we can think of.

3. People are always ready to share.

Give people the right forum and everyone wants to talk. Lots of our sessions were dominated with conversation which is the point of BarCamp.  My fear is that we will have lame presenters or sessions and the people will revolt.  This year we had some really great sessions with everything from technical talks to fashion and almost all the ones I went to were incredibly conversational and fun.

4. Too much food is better than too little.

We had plenty of food: Twenty dozen top pot donuts. Boxes and boxes of pizza. Plenty of Red Bull and water. So what do you do when you have leftovers? Well we found out the homeless shelters were not interested. It was tough to get ride of and we wanted to do things in a way the could help the larger community. No luck.  Ideas are welcome to improve this.

5. Seattle tech scene is getting there but is still pretty disorganized.

The Seattle tech scene often gets a bad wrap, some of it deserved some not.  I think that the tech scene is getting better but Seattle is a big city with different needs and geek groups. Maybe we just need better events to bring the separate groups together. 

And so on…

I want to thank everyone who came out and participated in our little event. We were also very fortunate to have a few people fly up for the event. (Most notably Tara Hunt.) So until next year…