It’s officially the first event I’ve been involved in organising in the blogging community and it’s been a great experience thus far. There’s been alot of interest as well as sponsorship and speaking offers which makes my task alot easier.
What we need now is to get the message out there and get people to register!. Herewith the details thus far.
I’ve secured the Bandwidth Barn as a venue and have set the date for Wednesday 28th May. Bandwidth Barn, 125 Buitengracht Street, Cape Town (map). Buitengracht street runs just bewteen Cape Town City Centre and Bo Kaap. There’s a Euro Scooter Shop just below it and it’s opposite a building with a Huge O painted on it.
Date & Time:
Wednesday 28 May 2008, 4pm – 7pm (feel free to come an hour early & stay an hour later if you’re a wordpress freak)
Speakers
* Mark Bloomfield – WordPress as a CMS
* Johann Botha – WordPress Security
* Rafiq Phillips – SEO for wordpress
* Adriaan Pienaar – Topic to be confirmed
more speakers requested
Sponsors Secured
* FrogFoot Networks – Domain & Hosting, the new domain with fresh installation of WP & a media wiki should be up in the next few days.
* Adii – Premium WordPress Theme as a prize
* Red-Button – 50 mb per person for the event
Sponsors Negotiating
T-Shirt sponsorships being negotiated (more sponsors required!) We’ll be putting a list of logos or urls of the T-shirt sponsors on the t-shirts so hop on board. if anyone knows of a good place we can get the T-shirts printed let us know.
We’re looking for a few people to chip in for Yellow Llama’s flight costs, he’s covering most of it but as I asked him to come down to Cape Town to speak I thought it might help if we helped him out a little.
Sponsors Required
* Snacks – Sponsorship required
* Looking for someone to sponsor copies of wordpress for dummies
* Projector Needed for the Presentations
* Additional T-Shirt sponsors
Marketing
I’ve been talking to a few people in my own capacity about the event, but need to rest of the community’s involvement in getting some interest going, sharing some ideas and preparing topics etc. Sharing your pics of previous events and blogging about the upcoming one will be much appreciated.
All you online social networking junkies out there are requested to work your magic with getting the message for the meet out there and drumming up some interest.
Sounds like it’s really coming together Nur.
One word of warning if I may. If organising the event becomes a big deal, and you become heavily emotionally invested in it, you might find it doesn’t produce sufficient return (emotionally, financially, and otherwise) to be viable in the long run. There’s always a risk with enthusiastic organisers that they create something which can’t be sustained, either by themselves or others.
When starting the event, I tried to keep it casual, low impact, and most importantly, little work to organise. The idea was that anyone could step into the void as easily as possible when I left.
For example, inviting new and great speakers every month is a full time job, it’ll start taking a lot of time once you get through the first few willing volunteers. It might even be an idea to string out those first few speakers over a few months.
I think it would be a shame if the meetups were to really fly for a few months and then lose momentum because the initial speed was unsustainable.
Anyway, I think I’ve gotten my point across now, so onto other topics… 🙂
Promotion
The word seems to be spreading. People seem to be finding out about it. One good thing that I didn’t really get right is a mailing list. It’d be a helpful tool to be able to broadcast email to people to promote the mailings.
The google group is more of a discussion list, where anyone can post. Something broadcast only would probably be good. You could add everyone who registers to the list after each event.
Another nice one would be SMS reminders. There’s a few folk in Cape Town in the SMS business. Grant Fleming at Fontera might be interested, you can mention my name if you speak to him. Or maybe better, just invite him along first, and see how you go. He’s a very switched on guy.
Oh, side note, Rob at Butlers might be interested in helping out with catering. I know he’s keen to get his excellent product out to the movers and shakers in town. Where better to find switched on young Captonians than a WP Meetup? 🙂 I can send you his info if you need it.
It would be sweet to get little cards printed with the awesome logo and the url. They’d make for nice handouts at other events, at the event itself, and so on. Something like the moo cards maybe.
Well, I’ve talked a lot about not taking on too much work, and now I’m making a ton more suggestions, so here endeth this installment from me. 🙂
Wow Callum, great advice and suggestions, pity you couldn’t stick around a little longer to impart your on site wisdom on organising. All points taken, I’m gonna just run with this as far as possible and try to get others into the planning side of things.
If it dies or goes slow or whatever so be it, but even if we get one great event every so now and then it would be a benefit.