With a focus on transparency and open-source, here is a budget breakdown for the conference, showing where the money came from and what it was spent on.
Budget Overview
The image below is the budget overview showing the top-level income and expenses. We used this sheet to ensure we were on track for the three cost scenarios (low, medium and high). We worked within a contingency of 10% of overall expenses.
Budget Line Items
The image below shows the actual line items for income and expenses.
Budget Summary
Total Income = $77,555
Total Expenses = $71,830.71
Profit = $5,724.29
All profit goes back to Linux Australia to be distributed amongst other open-source events and conferences within Australia.
WordCamp Sydney 2024 Attendee Survey
We received 83 responses from the post-event attendee survey.
What was your favourite part of WordCamp Sydney?
Due to one unkind response, I’ll summarise the top five responses rather than post them all.
- Networking face-to-face with new and old friends
- The speaker talks and stories
- Catching up post-pandemic
- The friendly community
- Q&A during sessions
What could we have done better?
Summary of responses.
- More talks on: technical development, marketing, security, SEO, and advanced techniques
- Better diversity of sponsors
- Network/photo wall
- Venue lighting was poor
- Website schedule should show: talk summary, target audience and skill rating
- Missing name badges, no pronouns on badges
- Friday’s social was too crowded and noisy
- Sat social venue and food were poor
- Wider variety of foods at break and on each day
- Prevent lecture theatre doors from banging
- Venue bins overflowing and lack of recycling bins
- More places to quietly chill in venue
- Hallway sessions unorganised
- More opportunities for new attendees / introverts to mingle
- Lack of official discussion on the Matt/WPE drama
- Lack of public transport to the venue
- Panel would be better on the Saturday
- Have a known non-WP Aussie keynote speaker
What was your key takeaway?
Summary of responses.
- Aussie WordPress community is amazing, welcoming, diverse and strong despite the dramas
- Networking
- WP Bingo gave ideas on questions to ask when networking
- Still a lot to learn about WordPress
- Charge more based on value rather than time and resources
- Boost to business confidence and best practices
Watch the Speaker Talks
You can watch the speakers’ talks by visiting the talk season on this website, using the WordCamp Sydney 2024 playlist on YouTube or searching for “WordCamp Sydney 2024” on WordPress.tv.
My Final Thoughts
Thank you to our wonderful WordCamp mentor, Devin, Linux Australia, for financial and mental support, and to all the sponsors, speakers, volunteers, organisers and attendees who made WordCamp Sydney 2024 a great success.
I encourage you to keep in contact with people you met at the event, build your network and get involved in your local WordPress community.