Hello,
I was one of the organizers from the NYC conference and I am from Seattle.
First, let me confirm as Pine said that this is discussion for the future and likely there is a perpetual offer of funding if Seattle would wish to host the conference. In NYC the format was as follows:
- three day conference
- 400 attendees (I think), with a third attending 3 days, a third 2 days, and a third 1 day
- 5 conference tracks, all volunteer presenters
- all volunteer planning team, with some hired staff per venue requirements
- hired catering
- WiFi necessary for everyone
- Running the conference was budgeted to 13k, but I think it ran to 16k, and no one had any ideas at all on making this cheaper; likely we could have requested and gotten more
- We awarded 22k in travel scholarships which funded flights and hostel accommodations, which again was the cheapest acceptable way to do this
- Our venue rental cost would have been 48k to be at a university in Manhattan. This was donated to us by the university, and if we had to pay for that, I am not sure what we would have done.
- Because of accessibility and diversity concerns, we did not charge admission to join the conference and accepted everyone who showed up. We did ask for registration, and we would have turned people away had we gone over capacity. We did warn some late registrants that we might not have room for them.
Most cash from the conference came from the Wikimedia Foundation.
We did some fundraising too.
If there were more discussion about hosting this conference in Seattle, I could help Wikimedia Cascadia build on and copy the preparation and planning that was done in NYC.
I should also say that while WM NYC did almost all of the event planning, WM DC managed the awarding of travel scholarships. It helps to have partners in this.
The biggest barrier to hosting a conference is getting a place to do it. If any university in the area would help host then that would be best.
In the past I reached out to the organizers of Seattle InfoCamp about combining their conference with a WikiConference. I know they have been looking for help organizing and managing their event, and as I feel it is so closely aligned with Wikimedia community values, I have long wished that our communities could collaborate.
It seems that this year their conference is cancelled, or rather postponed until next year.
Since they are having a bit of management crisis, now might be a good time to check back with them and see if they would partner with us Wikimedians. They already have about five years experience running our size of conferences in Seattle, and it might be that if we combined our two sort of shaky communities together then we could be very strong and organized together. At least it is an option.
yours,