WordCamp Lithuania 2015 Debrief

I spoke to Jonas Andrijauskas about 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. Lithuania 2015 – it was the first WordCamp in their country and was very well supported by the local community.

The numbers:

  • How many tickets were sold? 111 from site + 3 walk-ins (total 114)
  • How many people showed up? 107
  • How many people came to the party (estimate)? 40
  • How many people filled out the survey? 33 (they emailed all attendees via CampTix)

The budget:

  • Are all the vendors paid? Yes, except a few minor expenses (like shipping swag to the WP Museum.
  • Have all the sponsors paid? Yes.
  • Has the budget been balanced? Yes.
  • How did the money end up (+/-)? €1,227.23 surplus
  • What cost more than you expected? Nothing.
  • What cost less than you expected? Almost everything cost less – especially the speaker dinner, WordCamp venue and the after party.

The video:

  • What’s the plan to get them on WordPress.tv? They have the videos, but they’re getting speakers to sign release forms before submitting to WordPress.tv.

The opinions:

  • What went great? Very happy with the high attendance rate, especially for the first WordCamp in Lithuania. The venue was really great and the after party was lots of fun. They had a backup speaker ready to cover for one that pulled out at the last minute. They were very impressed with the communication and assistance from Central.
  • What could have gone better? Most of the attendees struggled with PayPal and had to pay money into the organisers’ bank accounts instead, but they will write a custom integration for a local payment gateway for next year. They struggled with having time for social media promotion, but will have a dedicated person for that next year. The video recording quality could have been better – Jonas feels that it might be better to hire local video professionals instead of paying to ship the Foundation camera kits all over the place. It would have been good to have a few foreign speakers to up the profile of the event.
  • What do you think should happen again? They had a job board up for people to post available jobs – that worked very well. They held workshops at a separate venue and that was very well received too.
  • What do you think should never happen again? Never use PayPal again!

Did you write a recap post? Not yet, but they will work on that and have it up on the site in the next few days.
Who’s on deck to organize next year? They have a lot more people from the community keen to help organise, but Jonas will most likely be leading again.

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