Month: September 2024

We’re not planning on moving, but folks keep asking. Why is BSDCan always in Ottawa?

For years the answer was “because Dan lives there.”

Then it was “because Dan knows everyone there and can arrange it remotely.”

Now it’s “because the committee knows everybody there and can arrange it remotely.”

Today, a more useful question would be, “What would we need to move BSDCan to $MYFAVORITECANADIANCITY?”

The answer? “Someone to do the work.”

Moving BSDCan to a new city would require someone in that city to take point on arranging convention space and attendee housing. Yes, we could sift through AI-spam-infested travel guides to find a place, but nothing can replace a live human looking at conference space and the neighborhood saying “Yeah. My people will like this.”

One of our goals is to be inexpensive. Last year BSDCan raised its prices for the first time since 2005. Many tech conferences cost thousands of dollars. We will not do that. That excludes the downtowns of Toronto or Vancouver.

We want nearby pubs and restaurants. We want interesting stuff for tourism. We want easy travel. This excludes, say, Nakina, Ontario. (MWL has been to Nakina. It’s lovely. It’s not right for BSDCan.)

Not only do we need a volunteer to do the work of talking to facilities, that volunteer must be demonstratably reliable. That means they need to be an active ops committee member for a good year before their proposed move.

You gotta help run a BSDCan before we’ll trust you to host a BSDCan.

We meet on the last Saturday of the month at 1800 UTC, and every Saturday the month before the con.

Having compared notes with EuroBSDCon, we are very glad that we can keep the same venue year after year. If BSDCan does ever move, we would want to choose a location that we can use for many years.

At the BSDCan 2024 closing session, I said we’d be transparent with our finances. Here is that report.

This summary excludes colocated events such as bhyvecon and the FreeBSD Developer Summit. While BSDCan provides considerable logistical support for these events, they pay their own expenses. We encourage these organizations to become BSDCan sponsors once they can. If you have a BSD-related event that you would like to host around BSDCan, do let us know.

We’re a Canadian conference, so amounts are in CAD. Numbers will not add up perfectly due to rounding.

Our income:

Registration $27,000
Sponsors $76,000
Misc $300

Total Income $104,000

Expenses:

Speaker travel $35,000
Speaker hotel $9,000
Food $15,000
Facilities $15,000
Closing party $11,000
Tshirts+totes $5,000
Miscellaneous $6,000

Total Expenses: 96,000

One of our goals is to have sufficient funding to pay deposits and fees due before we open registration. In 2024, Colin Percival fronted those expenses. While we reimbursed him once sponsor and registration funds arrived, “borrow an organizer’s credit card” is not a viable long term strategy.

We do sincerely thank Colin for his faith and trust in us.

We now have nearly $8,000 towards self-sustainability. We’re working to gather sponsor support earlier so we can avoid loans from the committee.

At the finance level, one of the things I’m notably proud of is that our travel team reimbursed most speaker travel expenses within a month. A couple people took longer for logistical reasons. We’re changing our CFP to gather basic reimbursement information up front, so that we can quickly reimburse everyone next year.

The goal of 2024 was to replicate the traditional BSDCan experience with our new committee. We wanted to learn what worked well and what could easily be changed. With our deeper understanding of the con’s finances, we’ll be looking at how to make BSDCan 2025 even better. I can already promise two things:

1. an upgraded menu throughout
2. announcing the BSDCan 2025 dates at EuroBSDCon

Speaking slightly more personally for a moment: my goal in taking over BSDCan was to transform it into a self-sustaining team effort supported and run by the community. It would do no good to transform BSDCan from the “Magnificent Dan and Adam Show” into the “Less Magnificent But More Snarky MWL Show.” Finance is integral to that effort. I am delighted with what the volunteers have accomplished, and look forward to handing the 2026 con chair (Patrick McEvoy) a functional and financially sustainable conference.