BarCamp Kathmandu 2024 - Rain, Resilience, and a Remarkable Turnout
Cloud of Uncertainity
8:00 AM - I’m driving to St. Xavier’s College, my alma mater, where BarCamp Kathmandu 2024 will take place. Its raining cats and dogs. Actually, It’s been raining non stop for the last 2 nights. The streets are flooded and the very little traffic that is out this stormy morning is being re-routed in multiple places. I am wondering how today will go.
8:30 AM - Several of the organizing team reach the venue. We are setting up the venue, but there is a cloud of uncertainity. The rain is not something that we had factored in our planning.
💬 8:55 AM - I get a message “Avinash, I believe you should consider cancelling today.” It’s a thought that has already cross our minds. There’s news of flood in several locations of Kathmandu. Several landslides have been reported. But we also had a commitment to everyone who registered. Even if just five people showed up, we felt we owed it to them to keep the show running. And that’s exactly what we were going to do.
9:55 AM - The first group of attendees show up. We were not expecting people to show up on time, let alone at all. This was the first motivation we needed for the day.
10:15 AM - A few more trickled in, and by now we had around 40 people. Not bad, right? Enough for a party. A BarCamp Party.
Fact Sheet
By the end of the day we had:
- 80 attendees
- 16 sessions - Photo of the scheduling board
- 5 of which were sessions proposed on the spot (rest were proposed on our website beforehand)
- ~150 doughnuts eaten (we were quite optimistic while planning)
Some fun facts:
- The first version of the BarCamp website? That was hosted on my window—literally. A ZimaBoard hanging right there.
- We printed and “cut” our own stickers
- The T-shirts? All printed by us, full BarCamp style.
Retrospective
All in all, I am really happy with the event and how it turned out. We (as wwktm) haven’t had organized an event since covid, so getting back on the “organizing” wheel took quite a lot of effort, But in the end, I think we pulled it off.
For next time, though, if there’s a BarCamp again [1], we’ll definitely plan earlier and budget better. The ticket prices were kept low this time, and unfortunately, we ended up with a few financial losses. But I’d like to think of it as an investment in future events rather than a loss.
[1] Let me know what you thought about the event. Your feedback helps us improve and motivates us to keep going.
Until then,
Be nice to everyone :D