Saturday, October 27, 2007

PodCamp Boston 2: PodCamp Retrospective and Prospective

20 podcamps world-wide in the past year. Why has it spread so far and so fast?

Current challenges:

- what size works best?
- does venue or location matter?
- wiki is not always user friendly?
- scheduling/tracking deadlines
- how do you manage volunteer staff?

How do you expand it out so that you don't have the same 12 people going to every one like Grateful Dead followers.

Today: about 550 people out of 1339 people registered. When you do not get those people out, how do you plan for T-shirts, food, sponsors, advertisers?

Does it need to be called something a little more inclusive?

Other unconferences and new media conferences are charging...

Whitney Hoffman did Podcamp Philly sponsorship like Lego - built out essential sponsorship first, and then sponsorship for non-essentials after.

BarCamp model was originally chosen because it is easy. But what do you do with the scalability, the second year?

What is Podcamp?

- opportunity to learn
- conference anyone can put on
- involving the community
- showing people they can create content, can share content on the web
- people are here because it is their hobby, it is not an industry; people are here to share with people who have a similar love

Sponsorships - not want to be calling the same people all the time; also, need a certain critical mass before people are interested; as podcamp becomes split up and more local, you may only need 1 or 2 sponsors; it has to be funded somehow; the idea of sponsorship by a company equals commitment to this community; even if organizations cannot give money, let them get involved e.g. in-kind sponsorships.

Send them comments about what you think podcamp is and what it should be: podcampboston@gmail.com

Discuss on the forums - linked from the blog

There will also be a survey (Survey Monkey)

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