Latest Reports

Its early days, but preparations for linux.conf.au 2013 are going well. We're working on the prospectus for sponsors and nailing down the final details for venues at the moment. The next publicly visible deadline is the call for papers, which will be in June 2012.

Exceeded attendee target of 200 registrations. This includes all the speakers. Due to exceeding our rego break even point, plus a fantastic response to our sponsor prospectus we have also been able to make speaker registration free, and reimbursed all those who had already paid. We are also able to record all our sessions. These were two goals we were not sure we could commit to from the outset, so it’s really satisfying we’ve been able to do that.

The budget is well in the black at this point, so we’ll be speaking with the venue about upgrading our food and beverage package in order to return more value to our attendees.

We’re also running a post-conference code sprint.

Media coverage includes the following articles:
Drupal Downunder is in Melbourne this January – Angus Kidman
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/12/drupal-down-under-is-in-melbourne-t…
Drupal conference comes to Melbourne – Sam Vargese
http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/51714-drupal-conferen…
Dries’ vision for Drupal 8 – Rohan Pearce
http://www.cio.com.au/article/411440/dries_vision_drupal_8/

Scholarships
One of the sponsors – Cross Functional – offered to run a scholarship program and is funding two people to attend who would otherwise not have been able to do so.
Our goal of minimising conference swag, doonwoggles and printed sponsor brochures has generally been met with approval. We have exchanged “supporter” status sponsorship billing with a number of organisations for providing in-kind support or Digital prizes for our delegates. Attendees need to answer a quiz – the sponsor treasure hunt, to be eligible to win these prizes – as a way of encouraging them to learn about our sponsors, without the usual brochures in the usual conference bag.

Key stats

Program
36 conference sessions – 4 tracks – adding 1 track above what we’d originally intended due to the huge response to the call for sessions.
3 keynote speakers – 2 International speakers, including Dries Buytaert, project founder.
See http://drupaldownunder.org/program

Sponsors
1 platinum sponsor
2 gold sponsors
6 silver sponsors
3 bronze sponsors
8 supporters
See http://drupaldownunder.org/sponsors

Pre-conference training programs
– Object Oriented Programming with PHP
– MySQL query optimisation & server tuning
– Drupal7 in a Day
– Hello Drupal (free)
Post conference training
– Full Drupal Development package
See http://drupaldownunder.org/training-drupal-downunder

Code of conduct
http://drupaldownunder.org/code-conduct