Before Lechazo

I am publishing this post one week before the lechazoconf… with the same idea as this post.

So this is a list of the things I think, before the conference, are going to suck. I wrote them earlier to check?/assure? my beliefs. Let’s see them.

• Budget. The budget is a mess, we are losing a lot of money. I’ve done lots of conference budgets (+10) and I’ve dropped the ball in this one.

  The catering told us, just 1 month before the conference, that it was going to cost +2000€ more than last year (and the previous estimation). We had a very tight margin before that (more money spent on trips for speakers and the party) and fewer sponsors.

  I’ve done what I could without compromising our values: paying for the speaker’s trips, returning tickets, having cheaper diversity tickets, raising the ticket price… but it is not enough.

• Party attendance. I’m very worried about this one (but way less than the budget)… the venue is small (about 170 people) and we’ve sold tickets without access to the party (students for example or late tickets) but I don’t like to deny access to anyone :’(

• Food. This can fail spectacularly or turn out great. It’s a new catering and forced by the venue. It’s quite expensive also. We don’t know the quality, either of the lechazo or the main menu.

• Quality. I’m less worried about the quality of the talks. But last year talks were amazing and I think it’s hard to top.

• Diversity. We have done a lot of things wrong. Lack of money (to invite more people), time and effort have helped, but definitely, our fault.

• Details. We haven’t worked evenly in the conference. I’m sure we have missed many small details. There are lots of things that we can’t do with the current budget, like a gift for the speakers, more coffee/water, more activities… this is going to be the aspect more affected by the lack of money.

  It’s also strange, we are a week away from the conference, I’ve worked so hard on it and there aren’t many tasks floating around. I don’t know if it is because we have focused on just the important tasks or I’m not seeing what we are missing. I’m suspecting the latter.

I just hope we didn’t mess up anything major. We’ll see in a week.