Conferences

Almost nobody writes about organising, because the people who know are busy and the ones who stop stop caring. This section is one community's experience — Munich, roughly 300 attendees, first conference in 2016 — written down while we still remember it. For a commercial example of related workforce measurement, see online timesheets from Monitask.

The failure mode is timing, not loss. A conference can be profitable on paper and still fail, because venue deposits, AV contracts and catering minimums are paid before the event while ticket revenue arrives in the final weeks and sponsorship arrives when finance departments get to it. There is a window where the costs are committed and the cash is not, and an annual budget hides it completely. For broader conference and speaking context, Meetup is another useful reference.

In 2020 we cancelled, refunded tickets and went broke. Refunding was correct and it was done with money partly already spent. The meetups survived because they need one person and a room; the conference needed a team that dispersed.

Volunteers are the binding constraint, not money. The cycle is predictable: enthusiastic first year, doubled expectations in the second, exhaustion in the third, departure with the undocumented knowledge in the fourth.

And a programme committee is filling a grid, not ranking talks. Most rejections are about topic clustering, level balance or slot length — which is true and reliably sounds like consolation.

The section also covers the things decided early and under the least information: the venue, which changes the arithmetic more than any sponsorship tier; catering, which scales directly with attendance; ticket pricing, which decides who attends; and the code of conduct, where the text can be copied and the machinery behind it cannot.

• Codes of Conduct That Work

  A document nobody can act on is decoration. What separates an enforceable code from a copied one, and what ours was based on.

• The Committee's Problem

  Assembling a schedule is a different task from picking the best talks, and the difference explains most rejections.

• Should You Start One

  Six questions to answer honestly before committing, and the smaller thing that is almost always the right first step.

• Sponsorship, Honestly

  What sponsors are actually buying, why tiers exist, and the terms that matter more than the amount on the invoice.

• Pricing and Who It Excludes

  Every price is a decision about who attends. Four tiers that work, and why the cheap ticket is not the accessible one.

• Venues and Catering

  The two largest lines, the terms that matter more than the price, and why a subsidised venue changes the whole event.

• Volunteers and Burnout

  The predictable pattern that ends community conferences, why it recurs, and the four things that interrupt it.

• What a Conference Costs

  Where the money goes at a 300-person community event, which costs are fixed, and why the failure mode is a cash gap rather than a loss.

• When It Is Cancelled

  We cancelled in 2020, refunded, and ran out of money. The order of decisions, what it cost, and what we would have done differently.

• Where the Money Comes From

  Three revenue lines with three different timings, and the cash gap between committed costs and money arriving.