WordCamp Chicago

Hello Chicago WordCampers! You may have noticed that tickets for WordCamp Chicago went on sale yesterday – and we’ve already sold 10% of available tickets in just a few hours after sales opened up. For those of you who attended last year, you know that we sold out after 200 and, regrettably, were not able to sell more due to venue capacity limits. This year is NO different – however, we have increased up’d our capacity to 400-500 and it remains to be seen if we’re able to climb higher. Last year, we had several dissapointed folks who didn’t make it to WordCamp Chicago because of our 200 limit cap. combined with the fact that they waited until the last minute to secure their ticket – – so, moral of the story is: Buy Early! Because once we sell out, generally, we do not have the ability to sell more – – Chicago is pretty strict on it’s capacity limits at their venues. So, we started selling 400 tickets, for now – – keep your ears here for updates on those numbers as the weeks fly by!

Everything hinges on the venue at this point and we are soooooooooo close to securing it – I can smell it, and it smells like the lake shore and deep dish pizza 🙂 That is all the venue information I have for now – – though, I can tell you that I am personally making the trip into downtown Chicago on Friday afternoon for a couple of meetings to tour and view a couple of different venue locations that are available, that meet our capacity and technology requirements – it’s just a matter of details at this point. Well, that, and any good reason I have to breeze into downtown Chicago is an opportunity I’ll snap up anytime – so Chris and I are coming for the venue planning and staying for the pizza! I should have more info on the venue in the coming weeks – – soon as I know, you’ll know!

That being said – I would like to put a call out to any interested sponsors of WordCamp Chicago. We have detailed information now published on our Sponsors page that includes information on our tiered sponsorship opportunities. Any support and assistance you can give to help Brian and I cover the costs of throwing this nifty shindig is greatly and deeply appreciated. Have a peek at our Sponsor Sheet and then drop us a line with your thoughts on how you would like to help sponsor and support WordCamp Chicago 2010! We already have a couple of interested parties who are being generous in helping us make WordCamp Chicago most awesome, but we do need more sponsorships to really help us seal the deal on things like venue rental, catering, A/V equipment, wifi, etc – so please let us know what you can do! (thank you, thank you, thank you in advance!)

Don’t forget to follow @WordCampChicago on Twitter and join our WordCamp Chicago Facebook page to stay in the loop before, during and after the event!