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Hello UGMs and Camp Organizers, Here are some very good EventBrite registration pages of events that were well promoted. Notice how there were speaker bios. Pictures, agendas... Info about giveaways... It really helps...
When I am working with Adobe Camp organizers, I ask them to NOT re-invent the wheel and create their own registration pages; Strongly urge, that you consider EventBrite.com (or meetup.com) because EventBrite has so many tools + keeps the records of all past camp attendees to save for the next camp the organizer may do. This gives the Camp Organizer more time to focus on content, local marketing (ie like hitting up all the local meetup.com groups about your camp), and camp logistics (ie food/drinks, space, seating). Additionally, I have been urging that Camp Organizers charge attendees a nominal fee...of like $10-$20 so the attendees themselves have stake in the event and just don’t sign up...no show...and prevent others from attending if the event is capped...This also helps the Camp Organizers plan for logistics like food, water, drinks. etc. Thanks to ALL of the CS6 Camp Organizers for their efforts! I hope the camp experience was rewarding + helped get a few new members into your User Group.
Thanks for reading... Adobe Community Mgr - North American Adobe User Groups
Hello Adobe Camp Organizers, For those who do not know, there have been some significant personnel changes that has occurred with the Adobe Community Team; We hope to have these changes communicated to the community-at-large sometime very soon. But, with the changes in Adobe's focus noted in this press release in November: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/adobe’s-transformation.html We will have to make some changes in the way Adobe Camps Program Application Process and ask for some additional details with each application. We will be asking Camp Organizers to be more detailed about the information on how they will be spending their sponsorship monies in their submission of the Camp sponsorships. We have a document that may help in this process. One of the User Group Managers, recently submitted an Adobe Camps application with this follow-up document/spreadsheet -- A Sample Event Cost Sheet. It is a very good organizational document... and would be helpful if folks would consider using something like this when asking for Camp Funding. It is not required, but I would recommend using something like it when submitting your application. The Adobe Community team has gotten smaller, so anything the Camp Organizers can do to show that they are more organized and know exactly how they will spend Adobe Sponsorship money... it will help. Lastly, I want to point out that the funding of Adobe Camps is not automatic; There has been a perception that Adobe will be funding Camps at the same level and in the same locations year after year; this may change as Adobe's business needs and focus changes. Please, Please prepare for this and get approval for your camp funding before starting to advertise your Adobe Camp. Cordially, Aaron Houston Adobe Community Mgr San Jose, Ca
Hi everybody, I'm Dang Huong Tra - co-camp chair of Flash Camp Hanoi 2010 which was organized on 27th Nov 2010 in Hanoi, Vietnam. We shared an overview of Flash Camp Hanoi on our website: http://flashcamphanoi.com.vn/?lang=en However, I believe that posting it here will give us a better connection. Flash Camp Hanoi hopes to be gotten advice for the next camp from you guys and always be willing to share experiences with you :) _____________________
With various activities such as diccussions, workshop (game making competition) , Q&A, knowledge from basic to advenced, Flash Camp Hanoi attracted 200 pariticipants from technological companies ,universities and colleges ,including the members having experience with flash platform or students who want to approach to Flash. The following photo reportages will show the excitement of Flash Camp Hanoi: The biggest regret was the absence of Peter, so we lost one topic but don’t worry, five others are still interesting
The feature of Flash – Thuan Do The
Quick demo of HTML5 and Flash in a real application – Dung Nguyen Quang and Tam Nguyen Manh
Augmented Reality in Flash – Thanh Tran Trong
Talking and sharing experience with Flash community – Linh Nguyen Ngoc
Optimazing in animation and design Flash – Nhat Ton Tuan
Hacking Flex and PHP – Duong Thach Now come to Student workshop : game building competition !
With the help of team supevisors , judegs and attendees really surprised about the quality of products ,especially the creativity of the members, for example: a team without designer could design by powerpoint !!!
Ha ,Quan and supervisor Hien were introducing Matching Game !!!
Thai ,Duy ,Toan, Loi were introducing Gay Typing Game , a perfect game in five hours.
Tung ,Hoa ,Toan and supervisor Loc with their product:Captured mosquitoes .
Finally, the winner was Matching game.
Quiz questions about Flash got enthusiastic participation with many witty and intelligent answers
The participants wrote entries for Flash Camp Hanoi.
Flash Camp Hanoi really had been very successful. Many thanks to Flash community, HAFUG, Adobe, FOF, Garagames and FPT University. Hopefully the future will have more activities like this for the Flash community.
For more information, please see:
(John: I'm reposting this Flash Camp blog post from Kai Koenig)
Before I start with this post-mortem post of New Zealand's first Flash Platform Code Camp, let me just take few seconds of your reading time to put this post in context. I'm Kai (@AgentK on Twitter) and together with Campbell (@campbell on Twitter) I run the Flex User Group in New Zealand.
Knowing John Koch from Adobe's community team, I toyed with the idea of running a Flash Camp in Wellington for quite a while and we started to take action earlier this year, looking into a September 2009 date. The event happened last Saturday (19/09/2009) and John asked me to write a post on how it went, lessons learnt and just in general to share some ideas. I wouldn't particularly think we've done everything right and/or we had a special and/or different camp, but I like to think that it went really well - overall. The community: In Wellington, we have a reasonably government-driven IT economy (we're the capital of NZ) - the other major field are rather boutique shops or small startups dealing with RIA, Web etc. User Group meetings in Wellington attract depending on speaker, topic and time of the year between 5 and 30 attendees. Setup: NZ'ers are not particularly keen on corporate-ish events. We rather have a nice carpet to sit on, good pizza and excellent espresso. With those constraints, a cinema or hotel etc. was not an option to go for as the venue. Other people might consider me insane, but I would have happily spent more money on a good coffee supply during the day than on a posh venue :-) That in mind, we went for a very informal venue and decided to just apply KISS. I'm a pilot and we booked the viewing lounge of the Aero Club I fly at - which is (handy enough) right next to Wellington Int'l airport so that it was a 10 minute walk to the event for people coming from other parts of NZ - mainly Auckland. Not posh, but functional and we had a little kitchen attached to the room etc. The venue as we've booked it fits about 50 people. Pre-Camp workshop (day 0): A friend of mine (Justin McLean from Sydney) is involved with Arduino hardware and RIA-development - basically tinkering with all sorts of stuff. From the funds we received from Adobe we were able to help with Justin's flight from Australia to New Zealand, he donated his time for free and we offered a Pre-Camp full-day workshop on hooking hardware into Flex applications. The workshop was not free but cost NZD 150 (about USD 90-100) per attendee. For that they got a full Arduino set, resistors, thermal resistors, a multimeter and all sorts of other stuff they could take home afterwards. Due to the nature of the workshop it was limited to 10 attendees (ended up having 9). People loved it - and it was awesome to see for instance Greg Dove (core member of the Flex Degrafa team) controlling visual Degrafa elements on the screen using a potentiometer in his hand. Venue for this workshop was the board room of a local Adobe partner in the CBD of Wellington - so no further cost involved. Overall: very easy to organise, the presenter donated his time, a local shop the venue and Adobe helped with the flight cost -> result: some aspect of Flex that _MOST_ people would have never had dealt with before and that's just awesome. Camp day: For this first event the idea was to get one room, a bunch of speakers and sessions and cap it at 50-ish attendees to see if and how that works for our community. In the end we had to cap registration after a week because it was booked out; maintained a waiting list for the time being. The latter was a good idea because during the registration cut-off and the event the odd person dropped out and we could offer WL'ed folks a spot at the event.
For the next event, we'd be trying to get a second room at the venue and open it for 75-80 people, having seen how fast people registered and how keen they've been on being upgraded from waiting list to full ticket, we're very confident we could have easily reached that number by continuing to advertise and put the word out more.
We wanted to create a very informal event for techies. As I've mentioned above: good food and good coffee (proper Espresso, not the usual "conference-coffee") was essential. The lesson learnt here (and I can't stress that enough): Get professionals to do it. Out coffee and lunch was provided from a cafe nearby, they even brought a mobile coffee cart in because they're been keen to put their brand out there for supplying tech events with their stuff. Very recommended, it takes away so much work, stress and hassle from the organisers. As the major decision makers of our camp are vegetarian, we decided to purely offer vegetarian food (which worked surprisingly well given that we're in New Zealand) and the fact that there was no complaint (but just one person asking if there's just veggie stuff) proves the point that to cater for the least common denominator works well if the quality of the food is good.
On the day, we had 50-ish attendees, each was provided with an event bag (containing a 2 GB USB key from Adobe Australia - loaded with Flex/Flash Builder, Flex SDKs, libraries and framework .swcs etc. - and other sponsor swag). Also, everyone got an event T-shirt - people could register their preferred size in advance until about 2 weeks to the event. People were absolutely happy with the bag (eco shopping bag) and they loved the T-shirt. We particularly went for good quality T-shirts and a very stylish design so that people didn't see it as "another conference t-shirt for gardening". We also offered fitted Girl-T-shirts which was HIGHLY appreciated by each and every female attendee.
Agenda:
As you can see, the agenda was totally mixed and provided a variety of topics. All speakers besides Justin were NZ-locals, Greg, Campbell and Tanya even having come over from Auckland for the day/weekend. I'm super happy that 3 of 11 speakers are female (as sad as it is that I have to point it out, would love to have had more) and across the genders we had a good bunch of people who never presented at a public event or conference before - the camp is a very nice "safe environment" to get people into that.
You might also notice that our session slots vary in length. That's deliberate because when we put the agenda together we basically defined the start, end and breaks and let people decide what they want to present on and for how long. We used a pbworks.com workspace/wiki for that and it basically just happened - people made use of it and put together an agenda that needed just minimal tweeking afterwards.
Lunch entertainment:
At lunch time, there was an offering from the Aero Club for a plane/airfield tour that about 20 people jumped on, two lucky folks actually even ended up getting a free scenic flight as "human load" in the back - for the purpose of a type rating check flight in a Piper PA-28.
A few more random thoughts that might help other people:
1. If in doubt - start small. There's nothing wrong with planning a comfy, small and most likely workable event for 50 people. Your first camp doesn't have to have 250 attendees. Next year's can be larger.
2. Get a steering group - get people to help you. Setup a Google group, meet in person,
come up with a budget (and stick to it) and distribute tasks. Speaking of budget - our main items were: Venue, Coffee, Lunch, Snacks and Softdrinks, T-Shirts and bags
3. Think about the necessity to have a legal entity. I ran everything through my own company - we might change that for our next camp and setup an incorporated society or something. The larger your camp is, the less you'd want to be personally liable for crazy things going wrong imho.
4. Use web 2.0 tools: We used Eventbrite for registration and attendee management, Twitter (@fpcodecampnz), Facebook and the good old email. Worked great.
5. If your camp is free for attendees: Communicate well and communicate often. We sent out an attendee newsletter at least every 10 days to make sure everyone is and stays aware of the event. You can send out a newsletter for every tiny new feature, "new session", "new sponsors" etc... It helps people to not forget your event.
6. Check the venue's projector. I didn't. It was 800x600 - not a major drama, but I learned from that :)
7. Get local sponsors. If you're reading this, you'll prob. have found out that Adobe is supporting camps. But get more support from local development/training shops. We got O'Reilly to send us a few books to give away. We got software to raffle off from various vendors. Be aware that if you're doing the first-time camp in your city, people might be careful to commit funding to you - I think we "sold" sponsorship for too cheap and we'll prob. ask for a bit more money from local companies to become a sponsor next year.
For anyone interested - the camp wiki is: http://wellington.flashplatformcodecamp.co.nz/
Any questions, feel free to ask and/or leave comments
Kai
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