Archive: Posts about Blogging Conference
March 23rd, 2009, 2 Comments »
Dale pointed me in the direction of this blog post that offers a rare insight into the sundry costs behind a major tech conference. DrupalCon is, I believe, the world’s biggest event celebrating all things Drupal. For the uninitiated, Drupal is a popular open source content management system that runs some of the world’s busiest websites (and may, in fact, be responsible for the world’s crop circles).
In the spirit of openness that pervades most open source products, the DrupalCon organizers have posted an ad hoc balance sheet for the conference. As somebody who’s organized a bunch of events (though none that big), they’re really interesting. DrupalCon had over 1400 attendees. Here are a few of the big numbers:
Revenue was more than a half million dollars at $542,350.
Our expenses came in at $356,569.31.
The Drupal community made a profit of $185,780.69 from DrupalCon DC…
Ticket sales for DrupalCon DC brought in $230,750.
Sponsorships of DrupalCon DC brought in $311,700.
I gather ticket prices were in the US $200 - 250 range. They had 54 sponsors who paid at least $2500 each.
Those are big numbers–the revenue and expenses are more than ten times that of Northern Voice or BarCamp Vancouver. I don’t have much to add, but I thought they’d be of interest to people who plan events.
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February 22nd, 2009, 5 Comments »
On Friday, @granvillemag made the common observation that Robert looks more than a little like Philip Seymour Hoffman. Robert and Maryam came up for this year’s Northern Voice.
That comparison reminded me that I’d had the same thought when I met Robert back in 2004. At the time Boris generously invited me to a kind of impromptu geek lunch in Yaletown. Robert and Maryam were there, as were Tim and Lauren, Stewart, Cal, Roland (hey, I like the new theme). I met all of them for the first time. As it happens, we talked about how Vancouver could host a conference about this ‘weblogging’ thing. Northern Voice was borne over Thai food.
I mention all of those folks not to be a name-dropping douchebag, but to highlight my favourite thing about Northern Voice: the vibe. I think the conference maintains a lot of the easy, inclusive attitude of that day. I attend a lot of formal and informal events, and Northern Voice seems to strike a happy medium of sufficiently organized chaos. I can’t say for sure, but I get the sense that that (dare I say it?) energy makes it easy to meet new people, and hopefully diminishes some of the social barriers that exist at other events.
Almost everybody at that lunch attended this year’s Northern Voice. Maybe that’s a reflection of the current conference’s comfortable atmosphere?
I think Gnomedex was probably a big influence on Northern Voice’s vibe, as several early organizers had previously attended Chris’s great events. They have a similar feeling of a level, open playing field. I’d also give some credit to the conference venue. The Forest Sciences Centre has a gorgeous atrium and seating area that encourages casual interaction.
The Best Northern Voice Yet
A couple of people I spoke to said that this version of Northern Voice was the best one yet. I’d tend to agree. A big congratulations to the organizers who did a great job with everything, from recruiting sponsors in difficult times to building a really strong speaker lineup. A few observations that struck me about the weekend:
- The conference is so much more diverse than it was five years ago. In the first year, I remember that the crowd was 80% male. This year we did a quick count and it turned out to be about 55% male, 45% female. It’s a sausage party no longer. I have no proof of this, but it also feels more diverse in terms of the age and ethnicity of attendees.
- When one of the organizers asked “how many people are new to the conference this year”, at least 60% or 70% of those in the audience put up their hand. That’s really terrific, not what I expected, and probably reflective of Northern Voice’s popularity problem.
- There were some sponsor prizes to give away, so I helped Travis devise some fiendish, space-specific trivia questions to ask using the Northern Voice Twitter account. My favourite question was “how many mustachioed men were in the 1948 Forestry program graduating class?” The graduating class portraits were hung on the walls of the building, so you had to hunt the right one down. Surprisingly, the correct answer was “two”.
I happened to notice that the registration list for PodCamp Toronto is about 850 people long. They’ve obviously got a much larger population base to draw upon, but I can imagine that Northern Voice could be nearly that big if it wanted to be. I think that’s the most important question going forward: how big does the conference want to be?
Photo by John Biehler
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February 17th, 2009, 14 Comments »
I’m giving a talk at Northern Voice this year entitled From Permalink to Profound: Where is the Art in Social Media? Here’s the blurb:
When an artist considers a blank canvas, she dreams of painting something beautiful.
When a blogger looks at a blank WordPress form, or a YouTube user stares at his own image in a webcam, he dreams of describing his lunch.
What are the most popular works that arise from social media? Sex tapes, silly dances, essays on open source software and renditions of Pachelbel’s Canon on electric guitar. They’re sleight of hand or stupid pet tricks, not profound art.
Social media seems to discourage the profound. Why is that? Where is the art in blogging or Twitter or Facebook? Can we create works of deep meaning and lasting achievement in social media?
That’s a big fish to fry in forty minutes, but I’m hoping we can have a conversation about lasting human creation and the social web. I’ve been using the Northern Voice wiki to assemble some of my thoughts and take a shot at my thesis.
If you’re interested, I encourage you to read over what I’ve done so far, and edit, add, disagree, suggest and otherwise contribute in the comments here or over there on the wiki.
To summarize, the central question I’m struggling to answer is something like this: who is making the lasting, universal, profound works of art on the social web?
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January 21st, 2009, No Comments »
First, a heartfelt thank-you to all of the Northern Voice sponsors, from this year and the past four. Without you, the average conference ticket would be at least twice what it is today.
The conference needs just one more sponsor. From our esteemed sponsor wrangler:
We’re looking for our last NV headline sponsor to sponsor the NV party at the $3000 level. We are planning an upscale dinner party on the Thursday night (more details to be announced soon) and are looking for a sponsor to be the headline sponsor for this event. Your sponsorship would go towards subsidizing the cost of dinner tickets, so that it’s affordable for attendees. This party is always well attended and we’re sure it will sell out, just as the conference has.
Times are tough, but here’s a way for an organization to be a shining star in the country’s biggest second-biggest third-biggest (I just checked, and Mathew told me that Mesh had 450 people last year) social media conference.
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January 14th, 2009, 17 Comments »
This year’s Northern Voice conference–the fifth one–pretty much sold out in three days. Tickets for Friday’s unconference lasted longer than Saturday, but certainly not much longer. And the wait list for each day is, by my guess, nearing fifty people. That happened with no marketing at all, besides blog posts and tweets from the organizers.
I have mixed feelings about that result. It’s terrific that the conference is so popular–it’s an affirmation that people really dig the event. But by virtue of that popularity (and despite its $60 price tag), the event has become kind of exclusive. If you’re not on Twitter or jacked in to the local blogosphere, you probably missed the boat on registering.
In years past, we’ve tried, when possible, to encourage noobies to attend the event. Last year (and I gather something similar is happening this year) there was a kind of Social Media 101 series on the Friday specifically for those who are new to this world. However, when the conference sells out so quickly, a bunch of those folks (and a bunch of connected, bloggy people too) can’t come. And that kind of sucks.
What To Do?
I’ve said for the past couple of years that we could double the capacity–from about 350 to 700–and still sell out. That’s never appealed, though, because an event that size would be pretty unwieldy. There would have to be huge or many rooms, more sponsors and considerably more infrastructure.
Organizer James and I were chatting last night, and discussed the possibility of making the event biannual. It happens during the spring reading break out at UBC, and could also easily happen during the fall one. If we did that, the association (Northern Voice went non-profit last year) would probably have to hire an event manager, because the volunteer organizers are all busy people stretched too thin as it is.
But I’m not sure that would actually solve the problem. I think most of the attendees who came to ‘Northern Voice Spring’ would also register for a ‘Northern Voice Fall’.
Or maybe not. Maybe doubling the number of conferences would, say, bring 250 people to each and normalize, at least in the short to medium term, the supply-demand imbalance.
It’s a nice problem to have, but one that becomes more pressing each year. Then again, maybe this social media stuff will die off in the next year or two, and Northern Voice 2012 will only have 59 attendees.
What do you think? Should we worry about too much demand and not enough supply of the moose?
UPDATE: Frequent Northern Voice attendee Mack posted his thoughts on the same topic.
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January 7th, 2009, 2 Comments »
Just a quick note to say that this year’s Northern Voice organizers have kicked the doors open for registration. The conference has sold out for the past three years, and we’ve had to turn away disappointed people, so act now. Or, you know, forever hold your peace. And don’t forget to buy a t-shirt. They’re reportedly a lovely claret red.
If you’ve never been to Northern Voice before, you should go. I’m biased, but it’s one of my favourite conferences of the year. I’m fond of its laid back mood and non-corporate focus, and we’ve been lucky to have really terrific speakers over the years. If you don’t believe me, just ask Google.
Photo by Duane Storey.
UPDATE: 126 people signed up on the first day of registration. That’s more than a third of the way to capacity, so if you’re interested in going, register sooner rather than later.
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November 19th, 2008, 1 Comment »
The Northern Voice 2009 website has been launched. And, thanks to Alexa Booth, it is a serious improvement on previous years. Additionally, the committee is now accepting speaker submissions. The deadline for submissions is December 19, 2008.
Given my relocation to Victoria and busyness, I’m taking a year off from the organizing committee. We’ve got a schwack of great new organizers this year though, with fresh blood and ideas. I’m planning on attending the conference and volunteering on the day. I may try to organize a panel or something, time-permitting. I’ve been kicking around some ideas about the social media sphere and maturity.
It is thrilling to see how our little conference has grown since its humble origins in 2005 (website only sort of works).
1 Comment »
February 24th, 2008, 11 Comments »
Well, it sounds like Northern Voice 2008 was another success. I watched via various dodgy video streams and a Skype back channel (I wasn’t the only one watching from afar). I also participated in a streaming (hmm…more of a trickling) video chat as part of our experimental ‘ask an expert’ booth. That’s where I took my only photo at the conference:
That’s actually not particularly different than other conferences–I’m usually too preoccupied to take photos.
And here’s a nice photo that Chris Heuer took of my friend Lesley talking to me. It was all very Max Headroomesque, but I was glad to get in a little face time.
In checking out reactions on the web, I was struck by how (it seemed to me, at least) there were fewer blog posts about the conference. A few bloggy wrap-ups that I did find: Boris, Rebecca, Kate, Mack and I’m sure others will pop up.
The Balkanization of the Social Media Sphere
I don’t think less web content is being made, it’s just appearing on a lot of other arms of the starfish. There’s more audio, video, microblog posts, streaming video, IM chat, Facebook and maybe less traditional blogging. You need only look at this year’s schedule to see how the 2005 ‘blogging conference’ has evolved into a 2008 ’social media conference’. I might bemoan the loss of thoughtful analysis a little, but otherwise that’s just the way of things.
I do bemoan the lack of tools to find and aggregate all that ’stuff’ in one place. I have to visit an increasing number of locations to feel confident that I’ve seen most of what’s been produced. Technorati and their brethren have not kept pace with this divergence and balkanization of the social media sphere.
Speaking of media, I’m always amazed by how many photos get generated over two and a half days. I decided to see how that number had changed over the past four years. Here, according to me and Flickr’s best guess, are the totals for each year:
2005: 620
2006: 1788
2007: 2115
2008: 2303 (so far)
And who doesn’t love a chart? Click for larger version.
The number of photos seems to map pretty much directly to the number of attendees.
Making the Conference More Noob-Friendly
We try new things every year. Many of these are aimed at making the conference more noob-friendly. This year we ran the Internet Bootcamp as an alternative stream on Friday, and set up an ‘Ask the Expert’ booth on Saturday. I gather the booth didn’t work so well. It’s also my instinct that the bootcamp ought to be on the Saturday, as that’s when we get more of the toe-dipping folks. I forget why, but that wasn’t viable this year.
Speaking of noobs, Meg Tilly is an author who appeared in Monique’s books and blogging session. She wrote a nice, touching post about her mixed experience at the conference:
And even though I only understood around 1/4 of the words that came out of the speakers mouth, that 1/4 was sort of fun, and it was a fun feeling. Like I was a little kid playing dress up and somehow I passed for the real thing. I mean, I am a blogger, but I’m a blogger by default. I don’t know ANY of the lingo. I don’t know what software I’m using. I don’t know what streaming is or if I’d like to do it. I DID know enough to laugh at the joke about pooh. So that’s something.
I particularly like how she spelled ‘pooh’ with an ‘h’. Or was she referring to Winnie?
We set up a post-mortem feedback page on the wiki, and we’ll probably send out a more formal survey in the coming weeks. If you didn’t attend this year, but want to be notified if and when we announce Northern Voice 2009, you can give us your email address here. If you did attend this year’s conference, we’ll definitely email you, so there’s no need to sign up.
UPDATE: Jennie Roth guest-posted a recap from an outsider’s perspective on Rebecca’s blog.
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February 21st, 2008, 3 Comments »
We were actually going to be on the backs of camels in the Sahara Desert during the conference this weekend, but it got pushed back a few days. So CamelCamp will follow MooseCamp by about a week.
Have fun at this year’s conference, which promises to be bigger and better than ever. Be sure to thank the organizers, volunteers, speakers and sponsors when you see them. It’s a non-profit conference and nobody gets paid. So what you see is the sum of a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
If you want to drop by and say Hi, I believe I’ll virtually be an expert in our ‘Ask an Expert’ booth on Saturday morning. More details to follow.
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February 20th, 2008, 17 Comments »
I was reminded by Vancouver blogger Ariane that there’s this ongoing nerd fight to own the number one spot for the Google search for “Vancouver blogger” at the start of Northern Voice.
Ariane’s throwing her support behind Vancouver blogger (et al) Boris, and other Vancouver bloggers are in the race. Who should I vote for?
I’m picking Richard as my Vancouver blogger of choice. I have no idea, but I feel like Richard’s–that Vancouver blogger–has been blogging in Vancouver longer than anybody. Plus, he’s a Vancouver blogger who has apparently expressed no interest in winning this silly, geeky wankfest.
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