I would like this thread to be a place to exchange experiences of organizing Joomla!Days. Let's share some thoughts to help people that is organizing these community meetings. I'll start talking about the Joomla!Day Brazil that happened on the 11th of August, this year (or last saturday, if you prefer). I think we've had a great event, got some interesting ideas and had received a good feedback from our community (so far..).
The frist thing you need to know before organizing a Joomla!Day in your country/region is that this is a non-profit, community-focused event. So, throw away all the fancy food and formal structure. Our idea of a Joomla!Day is a place where people can meet each other and talk about joomla the whole day. that's it.
The place:
we have chosen a room for 125 people to host our event (plus a room for coffee breaks, which were two: one in the morning and another in the afternoon).
Subscription process:
As we didn't know how many people would attend to the event, we've installed a newsletter component to hold a "tell-me when the subscriptions will be open" list. Before opening the subscriptions we've had a list of 166 people in this pre-subscription list. Unfortunately, a few days before the event there was a huge plane crash in São Paulo where many people died and the air traffic got crazy here. This situation scared most of the non-local people that were planning to go to the J!Day. (and I got desperated, Alex can confirm this hehehe).
We opened the subscriptions 15 days before the event. I chose to use Attend Events beta (http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/) for this process and one of our guys checked each payment from the payment gateway (i've made a "hack" in attend_events so it worked with a brazilian payment system similar to paypal...). Attend_events did the job just fine... it's still in beta phase and has some annoying bugs but it worked OK.
Sessions:
when discussing about which sessions we would like to put in our J!Day, we took brian's advice and created space for some flash-case-studies with a 20-30 minutes duration (there were four of them, always between the "long" sessions of one hour).
One important thing to notice: there are all kinds of people in the event. From users that are using joomla for 2 weeks to really nerd developers that want to know how is the new caching structure... So I would suggest you to [try to] mix technical, non-technical and not-that-technical sessions. In our case, we've chosen:
- A templating session, exaplaning how to improve the css design for the sites and this related stuff (as my flight got delayed I've missed this one :/)
- A SEO focused session talking about how to optimize joomla sites to google and search engines
- An outstanding case study (porsche)
- An overview of the new 1.5 framework and features
The case-studies differed a lot. We were not trying to focus only on cute uses of joomla. We tried to cover many aspects such as:
- why big companies are choosing joomla
- integration with heterogeneous environment
- joomla in NGOs
The community WILL help you:
We've defined our sessions, place, food and subscription mechanism.. but there were no guaranties that the people would actually subscribe (I'm using this word a lot because I don't know any synonymous. sorry
). So I started looking for something that could help promoting our event. Surprisingly, ALL comercial devs I've contacted had provided licenses of their products so we could make a drawing by the end of the day. In fact almost half of the participants had received an aditional gift from one of the "supporters".Also, the guys from this forum helped with some really nice ideas an advices on how to create a good event (most of the ideas in this post aren't mine).
Create some cool stuff:
Most people had disagreed with us when we opted for not giving lunch to the participants. But we've chosen to use their money to buy some cool items for them. I'll let the image say the rest:
that made people a lot happier than a lunch (and was cheaper).
The after event:
Although most people exchanged business cards during the J!Day, we want to make sure everyone increase their Joomla! network. So now we are converting our Joomla!Day website into a community site (of course, only with people who participated) so they can have e-mail addresses and other information about each other.
I hope this helps people organizing their local meetings.
Lessons learned: It is a bit scaring [specially when you have absolutely NO EXPERIENCE organizing this kind of event] but it worth...
Sorry for the english mistakes and for this huge post.
The Coffee Cup, the keyring also the Pen was very nice!! But what I liked most ist the Screen in the back of the Picture 
... 
