BarCamp San Diego 7 is upon the horizon. It’s slated for July 10th and 11th at the Intuit Campus in Carmel Valley.

We’re currently in the sponsor-roundup phase – here are the deets:

Its 6 weeks out and we’ve only made about half our budget. If your company, your employer or your friends may have an interest in sponsoring BarCamp please drop us a line : sponsors@barcampsd.org

The details are almost the same this time around:

1) Primary Sponsorship – $1000+
2) Secondary Sponsorship– $750-1000
3) Tertiary Sponsorship – $300-$750

Visa Gift Cards or Checks made out to Dan Tentler (the sponsor/budget guy) are the preferred methods of payment. This gives us the fluidity to combine smaller contributions from sponsors with other smaller contributions to afford the things that make barcamp awesome!

Alternatively you can elect to sponsor one of our ‘direct vendor’ costs:

1) T-Shirts – $1500
2) Lunch Sunday afternoon Sponsored by DiVX
3) Lunch Saturday afternoon Sponsored by Yahoo
4) Dinner Saturday Night – $1500
5) Snacks – $1100
6) Beer Sponsored by 2guysdrink

You may be seeing some rather large names up there on the sponsor dockett – Thats because these folks smile when it comes time for BarCamp San Diego – our community is so fruitful and awesome that these wonderful folks acknowledge it by helping bring everyone together to share ideas and new technologies. They lead by example!

There are some folks on the mailing list that have talked about recording every talk – and we’ve also heard from another awesome individual who would like to record every single talk and publish them online a-la defcon-style talks – very high resolution and with cuts over to the slides so the folks at home can see all the details. So far BarCamp San Diego 7 is stacking up to be a mammoth, but we still need help!

Looking for a job? These heavy-hitters use BarCamp San Diego as a recruiting depot – so spruce up that resume!

Looking for a gig? BarCamp is full of of folks who need someone that does exactly what you do.

Looking for talent? BarCamp is packed to the gills full of it – come say hello to a future employee or contractor!

and for all you perl/regex/coders out there: s/barcamp/talent exchange/g

In the beginning we had to ask for wireless hardware, chairs, extention cords, you name it. As time went on the planning crew better understood what it took to satisfy the barcampers and adapted. I know I’ve personally paid out of pocket more than 3 times to get things covered – and I’m not the only one. This far along though we have a tightly regimented process, and we’ve been using it for nearly 2 years now – it works perfectly.

We ask for visa gift cards and checks. It gives us as planners the flexibility to go to any store, shop or vendor and buy what we need for BarCamp. Our budget grows every season. This last BarCamp we had more than 300 people attend.

Comparing the rough budgets from BCSD1 and this upcoming BCSD6 we can extrapolate the rate of growth, and what to expect for next time, assuming the community grows congruent to the trend.

• BCSD1 had a budget of around 3 grand.
• BCSD6 has a budget of 6 grand.
• That means a couple things:
• We’ve doubled our budget in 3 years
• We grow our budget by 500 dollars every barcamp.

How did we come up with these figures?

Well, at first we had to literally throw darts. We had to assume, hope we got it right, then employ rapid course correction in the event we were off enough to cause problems. The second BCSD was a lot easier than the first.

The answer is that we grow these figures using the same algorithm as the budget figures. There were some troublesome developments though – many companies including some of our sponsors had to do layoffs due to financial hardships – so we had to lop off a chunk of our budget (didn’t get a shirt last season? This is the reason why. We can only print so many.)

Here’s what our budget looked like last year:

• Shirts: ~$1200
• Dinner Saturday: ~$1000
• Snacks: ~$1000
• Lunch Saturday: ~$1000
• Lunch Sunday: ~$1000

That totals ~$5200. This season, we’re aiming for $6000 or more – we’ll take as much as we can get. We’re expecting some numbers from the LA crowd to come to San Diego this time around – more than before, so we’re planning on seeing numbers in the ~350 range. Thats food, snacks, shirts and equipment for 350 people for 2 days.

Here’s how the sponsor contributions are laid out:

Sponsorships can be obtained in one of three levels:
1) Primary – $750+
2) Secondary – $750
3) Tertiary – $300-$500

Visa Gift Cards or Checks made out to Dan Tentler (the sponsor/budget guy/) are the preferred methods of payment.

Alternatively you can elect to sponsor one of our ‘direct vendor’ costs:

1) T-Shirts – $1500
2) Lunch sunday afternoon – $1000
3) Lunch Saturday afternoon – $1000
4) Dinner Saturday Night – $1500
5) Snacks – $1100
6) Beer – $250

Simply email sponsors@barcampsd.org!

We’re very flexible – our goal is simply to have the event happen. If a vendor is not comfortable with handing over cash, they are usually okay with directly paying the vendor (for example, for dinner, or lunch).

Now that you know, please – go spread the word! We want BCSD6 to surpass the awesomeness expectations of the previous five – its our 3 year birthday! Help us celebrate it by having an epic BarCamp!

You’d be right – except when we dusted off our hardhats we found out that year end budgets were tighter than ever, and many companies in town were doing layoffs. It’s remarkably hard to get companies to pay for a BarCamp when they can’t pay their own employees – so we did the sensible thing and scootched BarCamp out to January.

here’s the current lowdown:

• January 16th and 17th
• Intuit, Santa Fe Campus in Carmel Valley

We’ve updated the wiki and created a new Eventbrite Registration Page for BarCamp San Diego 6.

We’re starting collection for sponsorships as well, so if your organization would like to sponsor BarCamp San Diego 6, drop a line to sponsors@barcampsd.org.

That’s it for now! Feel free to log into the wiki and add a proposed talk or host a contest for Saturday Night!

So we’re about 30 days out and the numbers are in – we’re still short on funds so we’ve started taking up a collection to try and make our figures.

We’ve setup a Fundable.com account to collect donations to make our figures. Fundable is awesome because if the figure we’re looking for isn’t reached – nobody pays a dime. If the figure IS reached, then everyone pays.

Alternatively, if you’d like to make a direct donation, or if you work for a company that would benefit from sponsoring barcamp (read: any company), have any questions about what sort of awesome incentives there are for sponsoring a barcamp or are wondering how much value there is in sponsorship – drop us a line at sponsors@barcampsd.org!