Bubble Foundry

We had the iPhone Dev Camp yesterday at Mediamatic and I think that overall it was a big success. We had 80+ people packed in and coding throughout the day. While most of us were beginners, I think we laid the groundwork for an exciting mobile development scene. Today was spent recovering from the event (I’m still exhausted!) and got me to thinking. As much as I like organizing events, I think that I may need to scale back. I feel like some of my clients have been neglected and I have a lot of personal projects I’d like to pursue if I had more free time. At the same time, organizing events like the Dev Camp is a great way to meet a lot of people and also to get my name out there. From a personal perspective, maybe the events have achieved their purpose (some concrete examples later this week, hopefully).

What do you think? I’ll have to think and see what this means for Lunch 2.0 and the other events I’m preparing…

The Two Thirds Rule is very simple: for all the people that sign up for a free event, only 2/3 of them will attend. This has been true at all the Lunch 2.0s and BarCamps I organize (BarCamp Amsterdam IV being the exception) and I know it was also true at the TechCrunch/eBuddy Meetup. I also see that this occured at the San Francisco iPhone Dev Camp.

So what? Well, as an organizer it’s frustrating to plan for more people than actually come (food may go wasted, etc), so it’s good to be able to know how many people will really attend. Some people figure it’s worth charging a small but noticable amount (say €10) to make people feel committed. I haven’t done this yet, but my hunch is it would increase your yield to something like 3/4 or 4/5 of signups.