WordCamp Croatia 2015 Debrief

I spoke to Emanuel Blagonić, lead organiser for WordCamp Croatia this year, on 5 October 2015.

The numbers:

  • How many tickets were sold? 168 (they expected 250, but were very happy with the amount who came)
  • How many people showed up? 150
  • How many people came to the party (estimate)? About 50 (which is what they expected)
  • How many people filled out the survey? 58
  • How did the money end up? $3,400 surplus (they saved a lot of money on last minute price negotiations)

The budget:

  • Are all the vendors paid? Yes
  • Did all the sponsors pay? Yes
  • Was there a surplus? Yes – $3,400
  • What cost more than you expected? Nothing in particular – in fact a few things cost less than expected.

The video:

  • What’s the plan to get them on WordPress.tv? They’re sorting that out at the moment and will have it all submitted soon. They will also be submitting English subtitle for the talks that were in Croatian.

The opinions:

  • What went great? Everything went very well – the talks and the venue being the most significant.
  • What could have gone better? Video quality wasn’t great and a few wifi problems (provider pulled out quite late in the planning stage).
  • What do you think should happen again? Aside from the wifi issues (which were sorted out very efficiently), everything went so well that they want to basically do it all over again next year 🙂
  • What do you think should never happen again? Nothing was such a problem that a repeat would be a bad thing.
  • They only started advertising 2 months before the event because the guidelines state that you should only apply to organise 4 months before the actual WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. date – Emmanuel thinks that should be a bit earlier for first-time organisers (and I agree). One of the hurdles they had with planning was that they first had to decide in which city they were going hold the event, so the 4 months lead time wasn’t quite enough.

Did you write a recap post? Here it is – it’s a very thorough recap post that explains their feelings in detail. Doesn’t look it has been reblogged on Central, so someone will need to do that (I don’t think I have the right permissions for it).

Who’s on deck to organize next year? Same team, but maybe with a different lead organiser.

#debrief, #wordcamps