— copy and paste from Barcamp – if you can help please get in touch with them directly —
The worst thing that can happen to an event organiser has happened: the BarCampLondon8 venue has fallen through. Due to some massive mis-communications we can’t hold BCL8 at the Great Western Studios like we hoped to.
What is going to happen now?
We are working very hard to find a new venue. We have been talking to a lot of past hosts, exciting companies, contacting new hosts, and calling on favours. We hope to find a venue before the end of the week, possibly for a smaller size, which means we don’t have another batch of tickets to hand out. In the worst case it means we need to cancel the event, but at the moment we don’t think we need to yet.
How can I help?
Know anyone you think is worth contacting? Please do so and ask them to get in contact with Cristiano Betta (cbetta@gmail.com). We have created a very rough brief that you can use to inform hosts of what BarCamps are, so feel free to send it along. We have already contacted a lot of the past sponsors and other big companies, so no need to contact: Guardian, eBay/Gumtree/PayPal, Google, BBC, Lonely Planet, Microsoft, LBi, Nokia, and some more.
If you don’t know anyone, you can still spread the word of our predicament by Twitter, Facebook, word-of-mouth, or smoke signals. The more people know about this issue the more likely we can find a venue.
To summarise, what we need is simple:
- needs to be available on the weekend of 12/13 of June
- 1 “large” space that can hold enough people for the opening talk (~150)
- between 5 to 10 spaces for sessions, sizes varying between 10 to 40 people per room
- possibility for about 60 people to stay overnight for hacking, networking, and more
- some sort of internet connection
But I already booked my flight/train ticket!
We know that a lot of you have already booked train and plane tickets, so we don’t want to leave you guys feeling like you wasted money. We are looking at running some kind of event on 12/13 June, whatever happens. This might be a HackDay, or some other kind of smaller event. Any suggestions are welcome.
We value your support and will let you know as soon as we have more news!
Your Barcamp London 8 Planning Team
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