BarCampTdot and mesh have gone off almost without a hitch. It looks like somebody stole the keg and beer fridge that were graciously provided by Great Lakes Brewery. We are actively working with the Liberty Market Building and will be filing a police report. Bryce signed for the keg on behalf of BarCampTdot, and that means unless we can find the keg, keg fridge, tap and carbon dioxide canister we owe the brewery. It looks like a keg fridge varies in price from about $600 to over $1,200, we’re waiting for final numbers from the brewery.
To top it off we ran a slight deficit at BarCampTdot and we ran out of t-shirts before all of the sponsors got a t-shirt. We’re going to have to print a minimum of 12 additional t-shirts for our sponsors (that’s almost the whole crew ;-). That means that BarCamp ran a deficit of $172.39 on operational costs of $4,316.70, roughly a 3.993% overrun. Not too bad, but not great either. I’ll have to write up why we had overruns, what we could do to prevent them in the future at BarCampTorontos.
So we need to raise approximately another $1,000 (full details on costs from the brewery are expected in the next week or so) to cover the costs incurred by BarCampTdot. We’re not looking for hand outs (yet). The plan is to print DemoCamp t-shirts without any sponsor logos. What does everyone think about paying $20 for a DemoCamp t-shirt? That leaves a gain of $11.97/t-shirt or roughly 84 t-shirts to cover the costs of the stolen keg, keg fridge and costs overrun. We want to be up front about all of the costs and will disclose the full costs from the brewery once we’ve received them.
Maybe we can set up a Shopify store to help collect the orders? If you are interested in purchasing a DemoCamp t-shirt, please contact me about next steps. I’m going to have to finish writing up the lessons learned from BarCampTdot as we move forward with DemoCamp6 on May 30 and with BarCampEarth on August 26-28, 2006. We definitely applied the fail faster algorithm for BarCampTdot, but we’ll be better prepared the next time.
BarCamp is a revolution. People are talking about us. If you want to learn more about What is BarCamp? check out Joey’s post he provides one of the best summaries.
- BarCamp in Business 2.0 June 2006 issue
- DemoCamp in Profit Magazine
- The BarCamp Revolution – Part 1 and Part 2
- BarCampOttawa in the National Scan
- Bryce and W.R. on the first page of TechWeekly in the Ottawa Citizen
- Ottawa Citizen write up of BarCampOttawa
- DNA – Revenge of the geeks, now showing near you
- Economic Times