Finding sponsors and a venue
I've identified who I want to organize this with:
- Jonathan Goldsmith
- Trevor Nielsen
- Christopher Hinstorff
Right now, I am trying to find sponsors and a venue for the event.
I'm considering the Computer History Museum, but that'll cost around $40k for two days and a night. In order to raise that much money, we'll have to have sponsors chip in... or have the Computer History Museum as our largest sponsor.
It could be significantly easier if a company hosted (say, Google) — but that could cause other potential sponsors to turn away (say, Facebook).
So... regular sponsors. Even if we have $40k covered somehow, we need to pay for food, speakers, swag, and possibly even electricity. I'm speaking to Peter Norvig to get Google on board, David Cowan to get Bessemer, and John Britton at GitHub. Jonathan is speaking to Stephan Goupille at Facebook. Trevor is speaking to Anish Johri at Twitter.
Once we have an established venue and some sponsors to fulfill our base needs, we can really start promoting — and that's when the fun starts. That's when we can find speakers, workshop leaders, and the hackers! People may not want to come unless there is a well-established event.
And then I need to deal with prizes…