CiviCon London happened almost a month ago now so I thought it was about time for a quick review. 2014 was our biggest year yet. As in the previous years, we had a roughly 50:50 split between people new to CiviCRM and CiviCon and people coming back from previous years. We also had a fairly even split between developers, implementors and users.
As you can imagine the diversity makes it quite a challenge to come up with a session schedule that suits everyone. But it also contributes to a lot to the quality of the event, since people have the opportunity to meet and talk with people that they don't often meet in their day jobs. I met quite a few developers going to end user sessions - interested and inspired by the amazing stuff that end users have been able to accomplish (personally, I was really excited about how sophisticated some of the user sessions were this year); and quite a few end users were listening intently in developer sessions, where (even though they might not have understood every last bit of terminology) they gained an understanding of what was possible, and I suspect will feel much more confident when talking with their developers. Thanks to Ixiam, videos from most of the sessions are now available to stream online on the conference website and I encourage you to watch them.
As always, there was much that we could improve. At the sprint that followed in Edale, we had a pretty long after dinner discussion about what we would do differently next time. A couple of the highlights from that conversation include:
- single day tickets for people that want to come down to London and return the same day without incurring the expense of a hotel, etc.
- as well as having seperate tracks for users, implementors and developers, we split sessions into beginner and advanced (and potentially run beginner sessions on day 1 and more advanced sessions on day 2)
- a well resourced central point of contact for co-ordinating and supporting our volunteer organisers, to ensure that stuff gets organised in good time (as opposed to just in time)
All of the points from that discussion, along with feedback collected from participants will go into improving next years conference. A final breakdown of the finances is still pending, so we don't want to speak too soon, but we expect that we'll have made a small profit this year (we'll publish a breakdown on the finances once finalised) which will be plowed back into 2015. We've just starting planning next year in earnest. If you have other ideas that you'd like to see at CiviCon, or would like to get involved in organising, let us know.
