We have finally announced the dates for OPEN 2018 which will be at Conway Hall in London this year on the 26th and 27th of July https://2018.open.coop/
Last year Outlandish had a stall and CoTech (with significant support from Outlandish, I think) kindly sponsored the evening drinks along with The Open Co-op… which everyone seemed to enjoy!
It would be absolutely awesome if CoTech could do the same again and we will do everything we can to big you up throughout the run up and at the event
We (Go Free Range) helped organise the evening event on behalf of CoTech last year. I don’t think we’ll take the lead on it this time but would happily help/encourage someone else within CoTech to do so.
In case it’s of interest, there’s a breakdown of the Co-ops that contributed financially to the Open 2017 bar tab in this email.
Hi @olisb
Great to see Open Conf happening this year, I really enjoyed it last year.
I think it would be great to both have a stall and sponsor some drinks. For the latter, CoBudget is probably the best place to get this moving. Looking at the email, it looks like CoTech provided just over £1,000 and Open Coop put £1,000. Is that what you are proposing?
I’d be happy to attend and help run a stall if others from CoTech would be up for it.
Thanks @aaron and @chrisroos
It’s great to hear you enjoyed the conference, we’re hoping this year’s event will be even more focused and it will have a dedicated theme covering tech with specific sessions on Holo (following on from your sessions at Space4 with Art tomorrow), other blockchain based local coins, as well as other p2p, open source and collaborative systems / platforms…
Yes, in terms of the drinks, The Open Co-op is in for £1000 and it would be super awesome if CoTech could match that. In return we would feature CoTech on the event site, and on the show materials etc. and we would also promote you via social media and in our newsletters in the run up to the event. We could also offer you a few free tickets. We’re not sure how many stands we can have yet and are trying to sell those separately but I’m sure we could come to an arrangement if CoTech really want a stall too?
I’m not an “official” CoTech member so don’t think I can post this on CoBudget. @harry do you have any thoughts on this / guidance on how best to move this forward?
Not a problem about CoBudget, that was more my suggesting it as the next step than asking you to do anything.
How much are you looking to sell the stands for? If we know the overall cost and what we get for that, it will help with raising the funds.
And when do you need to know by, ideally? It may take a bit of time to propose and get agreement / support and I appreciate that you will have pressures on you to get the sponsors and stallholders in place.
Stands are £1000 too - and come with 2 free tickets (but not the other “big ups” mentioned above for sponsoring the drinks).
If CoTech chose to sponsor the drinks we could probably offer one free ticket to each contributing co-op up to a max of 10 - how does that sound?
It would be good to know about the drinks by the end of March, latest, to give us time to find an alternative sponsor… The stands are first come first served, so we’d need to know about that asap really.
Hi All
As we are approaching the end of March, and we’re looking to get this locked down in the next week, I wondered if there were any more thoughts about the idea of CoTech sponsoring the drinks, in exchange for promotion and free tickets as mentioned above? No problem if not - please let us know either way if you’re up for it / not!?
best
Oli
(is this thread still public - it looks “greyed out”…?)
I’m just wondering if there is any interest in the above…?
It would be great to get some input on this offer:
If CoTech chose to sponsor the drinks we could probably offer one free
ticket to each contributing co-op up to a max of 10 - how does that
sound?
… so that I can allocate tickets accordingly.
To be very clear the question is whether CoTech would be interested in:
Taking a stand at OPEN 2018 for £1000 in order to promote what it does to our audience
or
Sponsoring the evening drinks on the 26th July at The Square Pig in Holborn for £1000
or even both!? Both options would be great ways of promoting CoTech to a large audience of co-op members and organisations and come with loads of networking possibilities with all sorts of very interesting people… you can see more about the programme and the kinds of people involved at https://2018.open.coop/programme/
If I don’t hear anything in the next few days I will presume there’s no interest and move on…
This sounds great but, although I don’t know how all the other CoTech co-ops are fixed, I’m afraid we are really too strapped for cash to contribute at the moment.
Hi All, Just FYI in case anyone has not realised…
Solid Fund are kindly offering bursaries for co-op workers to attend the OPEN 2018 conference for FREE, on the 26th and 27th of July in London.
You don’t even have to be a member of Solid Fund to qualify and the bursaries will cover the costs of the ticket and your travel - but it’s first come first served so apply soon by emailing team@open.coop if you’re interested. More info here https://open.coop/2018/05/25/co-op-workers-bursaries-attend-open-2018/ - thanks to Sam Towland for proposing this and Solid Fund for making it possible.
