DDD 7 sold out very quickly and we know this has frustrated and disappointed a number of you.
Let’s chat about this.
We received feedback from previous years that some people found it difficult to be available for a specific time when tickets went on sale. In order to combat this problem we decided to try releasing tickets in 3 waves. Wave’s 1 & 2 contained 100 tickets and Wave 3 had 70.
We limited the number of tickets available to purchase as we found some companies were buying large blocks of tickets that often would not be used. We have also given a much smaller allocation of tickets to sponsors. Sponsorship is very important as it allows us to keep the event low cost and they also give us the awesome swag that we know you all love!
Maybe you need a bigger venue?
We are well aware that the demand exceeds our current capacity.
At the time of writing this we have sold 270 tickets & there are over 200 people on the wait list.
Many of you may be questioning why don’t we just book a bigger venue?
There are 3 main reasons we have not:
- Time
- Risk
- Cost
Time
DDD Melbourne is completely run by a group of unpaid volunteers with limited time & energy. We all have full time jobs & families just like everyone else.
Coordinators don’t take any funds or receive any benefits and all funds go back into the conference or supporting user groups/similar events or charity.
Quite simply the larger the event the more work that is involved.
Larger events become harder to manage & coordinate with more speakers, volunteers, food, and delegates. There is also a large amount of work that goes on behind the scenes preparing for an event from managing the website, questions, registration, packing delegate bags, organizing insurance and tax returns to name a few.
Some of you may remember the year we raised the capacity by 150. As a result we had long registration queues and not enough food – we don’t want to do that again. We have found that by gradually increasing capacity we can run the event we want to run.
One option may be to look at hiring an event manager but this is not a cheap proposition and may change the spirit of what we are proud is a community run event.
Risk
After a number of years supported by the awesome Swinburne University we have changed venues to Monash University (Caulfield campus).
Monash is a new venue for us and we are excited to be working with and supported by Monash but we want to ensure that we learn its intricacies before increasing numbers.
The largest room available at Monash hosts 348 people so if we are to ensure we have space for ticket holders, volunteers and speakers to attend the keynote we must limit the numbers.
It’s certainly up for discussion whether we want a key/lock note at all but this is not going to change for 2016.
Cost
This year we spent a lot of time researching commercial venues to expand capacity but realized that we lacked the funds without running into cash flow issues to pay the deposit for a larger venue (we don’t receive payment from ticket sales until after the event).
A venue of a decent size in a reasonably central Melbourne location with a number of rooms can cost upwards of $20,000 before we even look at catering costs. In order to make this work, we would have had to ask some of the organisation team to lend the cash. As you can probably understand, we were not comfortable with this and decided to postpone this idea.
Conclusion
In conclusion we know some of you will be disappointed in not obtaining tickets and every year we are humbled by the demand for them. We have an awesome developer community here in Melbourne and we massively appreciate everyone’s support.
We have some ideas about how to approach this issue for next year and look forward to sharing them in the future.
In the meantime why not look at these other great community events or look out for a future dddbynight event?:
http://www.lastconference.com/
We even documented some of our learnings if you were interested in running your own conference
https://github.com/alexmackey/openddd/wiki
https://github.com/OpenDDD/dddmelbourne
DDDMelbourne 