Building in Public: Week 2
How.Camp is a free, open, collaborative event for free software and open-source. It will happen on the 27th of July in Gabrovo – a small mountain town in Bulgaria famous for the humor and the bird place of the fantastic artist Christo (yes, you have heard of it).
I decided to share some of our activities, inspire others to follow our steps, and organize their FOSS event.
Registrations
We replaced the plain old Google form with a free subscription to ti.to.
Even though the name brings terrible memories, the service is impressive. Every attendee can get a free ticket and a spot at the event. It's also easier for us to manage it via a usable interface. Currently, we have 15 people registered, which lands us at 12% of our capacity.
Donations
Organizing such an event has its downsides. Most of the time is money. Even though we got a small budget from our savings, we decided to open a donation effort to see if the community could help us cover the expenses transparently. We subscribed for Ko-Fi, and our page is here.
Speakers
We agreed with five people already to come and talk at our event. More info about them is available on the page, and we will have a separate article on that topic soon.
Website
We used a privacy-respecting service called liteanalytics.com to keep an eye on who is visiting our site and from where so we can focus more on creating targeted content.
Here are some statistics from the last week.
Press-release
We decided to publish a press release using EIN services. Here is the copy we sent out. We expect limited attention because nothing is super newsworthy in our event. We got a few backlinks and tons of spam calls.
Mastodon
As a reminder, our mastodon account is @howcamp@fosstodon.org We have a small but steady trend up, and now we have 25 followers, compared to 19 last week.
Thanks for reading this!