I’m just about to head to bed after a fantastic weekend at Barcamp London, over the weekend we had several discussions about how different this one was and what could be improved next time.There still seems to be an average of 20% of people that “request” a ticket then don’t show up, there have been many different ways of combating this (emailing a couple of days before to “confirm” your ticket, making them pay a deposit, making them create a t-shirt).
It’s obvious that when you force the ticket holder to make an effort to either a) get a ticket or b) jump through hoops to get there, they have a greater chance of attending, almost everytime that customised a t-shirt turned up (thats not official numbers from the orgaisers by the way but I helped out on registration and thats what I saw).
I think a returnable deposit is a great idea but its not viable with time and energy in a free event, I don’t think there is a one size fits all solution…but we are getting there..
My main worry is how long we can keep these free conferences going, with sponsorship getting harder and harder to get, its not easy to pay for pie + pizza for 100+ people and get a venue and get drinks and snacks and organise the website and sort regulations and….
Money has always been hard to come by for these events but I wonder how long we can keep barcamps as a whole going with our hat out infront of our arms saying “Please Yahoo….can we have some more?”
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Perhaps overbook by some percentage ?
The organisers considered overbooking – I was up for that (the way airlines do it) – but it was too big a risk for most of the Crew. If you get too many people an airline can bump you to another flight – if a barcamp gets too many people what do you do?
The BBC overbooks for all of its shows, since they are free they argue they do not need to guarantee a place in the audience. Chatting to one of the organisers they virtually never fill to capacity even when overbooking by 20%