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Your budget is going to be refined and adjusted as you determine how many attendees you think you’ll get and how much you’re going to commit to spending up-front. You’re not going to know all these numbers immediately, but it’s valuable to start thinking about them as you’re choosing a venue.

Categories to consider:

Income:

• Sponsors (could be up to 75% of your income, depending on sponsorship levels)
• Registrations (make sure to set this such that you’re covering per-attendee costs)

Expenses:

• Venue for talks & open space discussions
• Internet for attendees
• Livestream/recording/captioning of talks
• Catering for breakfast/coffee breaks/lunches (some venues require the use of their caterer)
• Evening event
• T-shirts/other swag
• Badges/lanyards
• Signage
• Speakers dinner
• Speaker gifts (small token)
• Insurance/taxes
• Payment for accounting services

Important Reminder: As you’ve seen in the rules above, these events are not intended for individual or corporate profit. This includes unnecessary high personal expenditures for the benefit of organizers. We can’t give precise numbers as to what qualifies as large amounts, since that would vary widely. Consider typical appropriate pricing for your region, and determine if you would find it to be unusually expensive.

Reasonable expenses for organizers:

• Travel & lodging to participate in your event
• Travel & lodging to participate in other DevOpsDays events for the purpose of making yours better
• Local transportation to & from your devopsdays event or planning meetings
• Clothing such as shirts to make the team stand out during the event
• Food and beverage for meetings before and after the event (at typical prices for the region)
• Expenses for organizers which may be inappropriate:

Gifts for organizers which are not given to attendees and/or speakers

• Expensive food and beverage for organizer meetings (outside of typical prices for your region)
• Travel outside of devopsdays participation needs (including luxury packages, travel to other events, etc).
• When deciding on appropriate expenditures, check with your local team and reach out to the core team if you’d like guidance.

Remember, these funds are intended to serve your community!

Now that you have assembled your team, the next step is choosing a date. We usually take the following into consideration to find a good date:

Avoid overlapping dates with other devopsdays, especially nearby. We want to spread the events out; think of it as loadbalancing. All devopsdays events with their dates scheduled will be shown on the front page of devopsdays.org.
Avoid overlap in dates with other important local events: with other events happening at the same time, your attendance rate might be affected negatively

‘Piggyback’ after/before other events: it’s a great way to get started, and as people might have traveled already, they can potentially be interested in a pre or post event conference
Keep on eye on other major industry events so as to avoid accidentally scheduling during a time when it may be more challenging to get the speakers and sponsors you want.

You cannot announce a date until you have two things:

• an agreement with a venue,
• way to handle money.

Look at a few two-day choices you can accept. When talking to a venue, you might find that they can accommodate you better during some parts of the week than others. Sometimes they may be fully booked a given week, but available the next.

Consider that if you schedule one or more day on a weekend, you are likely to see a significant drop-off of attendance on the weekend day(s). DevOps is part of people’s work life, and the weekends are typically used for refreshing energy with family. We recommend choosing weekdays.

Part of organizing the event is handling of the local event’s money. This will be needed for:

• Invoicing sponsors and accepting their payments.
• Accepting money from and (as needed) sending official invoices to people that register
• Paying suppliers like the venue, catering, T-shirts, etc.
• You cannot announce a date until you know you have a way to handle money. Realizing too late that you cannot process money has led to rescheduled or canceled events in the past.

The way many events have handled this is to find a local company that is willing to handle these logistics. In some countries, a local company is the only way to handle taxes. Some events register a local not-for-profit entity; there is no such central entity.

Depending on the size of the event, you might want to give them a Silver or Gold sponsorship in return. Make sure they understand they will need to generate invoices and accept/make payments with a fast turn-around.

If a local company is not an option, we’ve worked with a few companies in the past that are willing to help you for a fee:

US Based: Laura from Conference Ops
EU Based: Bernd from Netways
If you would like to use this method, contact us to get more details.

To make invoicing smooth, it helps to use that company’s paypal account for registration (on eventbrite or equivalent) and to use paypal (or equivalent) buttons generated by them for sponsor packages.

In the Devops spirit of collaboration, find people in your region that want to help you run the our awesome event.

• Identify the two to four key organizers

• Talk to people at your local devops or related community meetups.
• Tweet that you’d be interested in running one in your region. (Use the #devopsdays hashtag.)
• Email the global core organizers and we’ll try to connect you to other people in your region

You’re going to need at least three people from three different organizations on your local organizing team, so you have a broader base of support and involvement from the community. We aren’t going to green-light events put on by just one company, and you’ll want the organizers from the relevant local meetups on board. Make sure everyone understands this is not about lead generation; organizers cannot use contact info from the event for their own companies.

When you have your initial team, email the global core organizers and we’ll schedule a kickoff meeting with you. This will be an hour-long video call with your team.

• After the kickoff meeting, we’ll wait for you to send your initial pull request and for you to email us the email addresses and names of your organizer team. When we have those, we can officially set your event’s tools up.

• The way you get your event listed on the website is by submitting a pull request to https://github.com/devopsdays/devopsdays-web. The instructions can be found on that repo’s README.

We prefer the city name for the actual email and site. Wider regional terms are less preferable since someone in a nearby city may want to host their own devopsdays. Fun nicknames require too much dereferencing of pointers and so are best kept for slogans and t-shirt designs.

It’s fine if you just list the organizers, the city, and say “coming soon”. You don’t need to have selected the date and venue yet; however, we won’t merge a PR with dates unless it also has a venue listed. You also do not need to open registration or open the CFP right away.

• The devopsdays code of conduct for the overall organization is based on the template from Conference Code of Conduct. You will need to have a code of conduct for each event before your initial pull request will be merged; you can use or adapt the provided template as desired. (You can add local numbers, email addresses, and contacts as needed.)

We’ll set up the [email protected] mail alias for your team. This will let you have a standard email listed as a public-facing organizer point of contact. All organizers on your team need to be on this alias individually, and the global core team is also on this email alias. It’s fine to use other email lists, chat programs, and other tools for your internal coordination and outgoing announcements, but we require that your event’s published organizer_email: field be set to this for consistency and problem prevention.

We’ll also invite all your organizers to the global devopsdays organizer Slack team (with organizers from around the world!) so you can meet other organizers and share ideas. Using the global devopsdays organizer Slack is optional, and is also the best way to meet and chat with other devopsdays organizers, get help with the website and other tooling, and tap into the collective history and wisdom of devopsdays events from around the world! The only people we’ll invite to this Slack are the people listed as organizers on your contact page, and if you join, it’s a good idea to list your city in your Slack profile. If you want to use Slack for attendees at your event, you should set up a different one.