WordCamp Auckland 2017 budget

Organising a conference is not simple. There’s a lot of small details that need to be put together before the event. As you can imagine there’s a lot of costs involved including food, venue, videographer even water bottles or even napkins.

WordCamps are made by the community for the community. They are very cheap events to make it affordable for everyone. All of it is possible because of our amazing sponsors that helped with funding the whole conference.

WordCamps are Open Source too, we are open about all spendings and earnings so below is the budget summary of WordCamp Auckland 2017.

A few key elements to note:

  • The ticket price for 2 days event, including food, was $50 (or $150 as community sponsor). The cost per person for the conference was $183.45  or $91.73 per day. As you can see, the cost of the ticket covered about 30% of the cost per person.
  • The conference is organised by amazing volunteers which mean there’s no labour cost. Each of the person involved including organisers devotes hundreds of hours of their own, free time, to make the conference affordable and cheap
  • Total cost of WordCamp Auckland 2017 for 87 attendees was $15,960.28

You can download WordCamp Auckland budget summary and check every single earning and spending.

If you have any questions regarding the budget, please get in touch or pop in to Auckland WordPress meetup and talk to organisers. Below we’ll try to summarise FAQ.

There’s $993.22 left from the budget, where does it go to?

WordCamps are organised by volunteers and overseen by WordPress Foundation. They appear all over the world and as you can expect, some of them have leftovers money, some of them run out of the money. All of the funds collected by WordCamp Auckland 2017 organisers went to WordPress Foundation itself that paid the bills. Anything left goes to the fund to help to pay the bills for WordCamps in the area that didn’t manage to cover the cost of the conference. This way we can make sure that all WordCamps will be affordable and really cheap.

Can I organise WordCamp or WordPress meetup?

Yes! We encourage anyone to join our New Zealand WordPress community. We have a strong community in Auckland and growing community in Wellington. We would be delighted to see more volunteers in these areas and in other cities (yes we’re thinking about you Christchurch).
WordCamps are usually organised once a year in each country. We’re during very early stages of thinking/planning about WordCamp New Zealand 2018 (city TBA). If you’d like to help to organise please get in touch!

WordCamp Auckland speakers’ videos

Hello WordPress Auckland community! After a few months of recovering from a busy schedule, we’re finally here, to sum up the conference and give you a full summary.

We’ve uploaded all videos to a youtube channel. Below is the list of all individual talks we’ve recorded:

Craig Martin – Scale your business with WordPress – Tips from the front line

Kristen Symonds – (Not) Just another WP REST API Talk

Dee Teal – Project Management Principles to improve Work, Life, and your Mental Health

Maria Skatova – Considering freelancing as WordPress developer? Think twice.

Matthew Knighton – Using the WordPress API to Sync a Mobile App

Nik Cree – How To Create A Weekly Newsletter In Less Than 17 Minutes A Week

Ngaire Ackerley – Designing for website users

Peter Willson – I’m an imposter because…

Pam Kocke, Deborah Beckett – Why you should give great support

We did it!

Well WordCamp Auckland 2017 is all wrapped up for the year. We wanted to say thank you to everyone who shared the experience with us, what a rush!

Keep the conversation going

We spoke a lot about community at WCAKL2017 – if you are interested in meeting up, reaching out or starting your own local community here are some options:

  • WordPress New Zealand Slack: This is where all organisers, developers, designers, journalists, users and anyone involved in WordPress NZ discuss online: http://wpnz-slack.herokuapp.com – join us!
  • Auckland WordPress Meetup: Happens every month, announcements normally 2 weeks in advance also #wpauckland in slack.
  • Wellington WordPress Meetup: In the process of restarting, but reach out in #wpwellington channel on slack.
  • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aklwp
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/aucklandwp

If you want to contact Ralf Klis or Tarei King, ping either directly in WordPress New Zealand Slack.

Videos

We have recorded all videos – there is a fair amount of post-editing work required as we manually cut in speaker slides, this might take a month or so. But we will do an announcement post / email when they are available.

Speaker Slides

These will be arriving in due course – we will post another update once we’ve collated them all.

Budget

You might have heard us say the budget will be released online – in a continued effort from all participating WordCamp’s (we first saw this at WCSydney, so props them!) we will be releasing the budget once we paid our last few vendors. Expect this be the end of the month.

A quick ooopps

In the last minute rush we’d forgotten to put our community sponsors on the website, combined with a rush of projector issues in our closing remarks timeslot – we also weren’t able to showcase them there either.

To say thank you – we’ve emailed our community sponsors and will post an individual thank you via twitter.

Thank you – seriously!

We had some a great time meeting everyone, sharing stories and generally having fun with other WordPress community members – if you need any help out there, please get in touch – quickest way is slack, but any of the other contact methods will be fine!

Photo credit:
WordCamp Auckland Group Shot” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by kristarella

Welcome to WCAKl2017!

We’ve arrived and will be getting everything ready for you. But here is a little picture if you are looking for us. 

See you soon!

Saturdays schedule

Be safe getting to #WCAkl tomorrow. Registration opens at 9.00am with our intro and first sessions starting from 9.45am.

The schedule is available at our Schedule page.

Weve just wrapped up the setup – the venue is locked in and some cozy tunes will be playing to lighten the mood – so we are all excited for #WCAkl tomorrow.

Thank you to all sponsors, volunteers, speakers and of course — you for attending #WCAkl.

 

Last 10 tickets – join us this weekend! 🎁 😍

TLDR – 10 tickets left, buy now here.

We’ve got 13 speakers, all experts in their respective field discussing topics like freelancing, design, business ownership and development. All talks can be seen here on our schedule page .

We have 10 attendee tickets left! So snap one up, and join us  this weekend by buying a ticket here.

What is a WordCamp?

WordCamp’s are an annual gathering of the wider WordPress community and this year we’ve got speakers and attendees coming from as far as USA, Australia and Wellington.

Why attend?

This really is a chance to meet some of excellent WordPress community members – experience what else WordPress can unlock and be apart of the community. WordPress is more than a web platform, it is a collection of awesome people, using and building WordPress to raise the experience for everyone!

Chances are – you’ll be sitting right next to the next speaker, so introduce yourself to everyone and anyone, make new friends and you might learn a little something awesome.

Can’t make it, but want to join the community anyway?

We meet each month in the same location to discuss WordPress and hear from speakers about a range of topics from business to design and everything in between. Come join us at Auckland WordPress Meetup.

Don’t get lost getting to #WCAkl, srlsy.

Trust this map. It’s accurate!

More than a few people have trouble finding the GridAKL venue, don’t trust your map app, as their are road closures and you can only get in from the Wynyard Quarter end of Halsey Street. 

Their is pedestrian access from Halsey street, but access the doors on Pakenham street may be closed. 

There is more information on our getting here page.

Take the time to get familiar with the area before coming in, it’s not worth getting wet. 

There is also no on street parking nearby, there is is a car park on Jellicoe Street, so try public transport or an über. 

A quick attendee guide to WordCamp Auckland!

While the gloomy weather might be here to stay on the weekend – we ain’t worried, we are inside the nicest co-working space in Auckland aka GridAKL and have a nice breakout area available to shelter from the storm.

Here’s a little guide to what you’ll need to know:

  • All up, we have 70 attendees, including speakers so it’s going to be an intimate WordCamp.
  • Getting here is can be confusing .. GridAKL have a guide for that, but find us here.
  • Check out the schedule of talks and plan your day!
  • Review our speakers and introduce yourself throughout the event!
  • Your name: We’ve got a list of attendees, so you don’t need to print out emails. Just show up and we will get you on the day.
  • We have dietary options catered!
  • Registration is from 8:45am on saturday. Join us early – say helloW and be ready for the first session at 9:30 am.
  • After Party: There is a social event on saturday night. At La Zeppa restaurant in Victoria Park Market. We will have nibbles and drink tokens for all attendees!
  • Sunday starts at 9:45am – first session is at 10am.
  • All done and dusted by 4.40pm on Sunday. 

We’ve done a lot to ensure the conference is really relaxed ~ if you feel you need help, have questions or need assistance from an organiser, please reach out to Tarei King, Ralf Klis or any of the volunteer team as needed!

It’s been a real pleasure organising this event! We are super excited to see you this weekend!

Got a specific question ahead of the conference? Reach out below in the comments 🙂

Thank you WP NET – Mt Ruapehu (Silver) Sponsor

A big thank you to WP NET, a Mt Ruapehu (Silver) sponsor of WordCamp Auckland 2017. If you’re looking for a 100% dedicated managed WordPress web host in NZ, look no further than WP NET – New Zealand’s first such service.

Whether you need a dedicated server or cost-effective shared-server hosting, WP NET can sort you out.

Thanks for looking out for your local community WP NET!

Big thanks to JetPack, Mt Cook (Gold) Sponsor

JetPack, alongside WooCommerce, are a Mt Cook (Gold) sponsor of this year’s WordCamp Auckland.

If you’re setting up your own WordPress site and you’re looking for a great all-round tool, JetPack is the way to go. This one plugin has so many features in one – from bulk plugin updates, boosting traffic, uptime monitoring, brute force protection and much more – this is a one-stop shop for streamlining and boosting your website’s functionality.

We are chuffed to have JetPack as one of our two Mt Cook (Gold) sponsors of WordCamp AKL this year. Big thanks to you JetPack for supporting our local WordPress community.