Mountain Camp 2025 — Organiser Retrospective¶

Distilled from the org team's retro board (Mar 24, 2025), the 2024-25 sync notes, the sponsor tracker and the budget. Aggregated and anonymised: no names, no contact details. Attendee feedback lives in feedback-analysis.md; this page is the organisers' side.

TL;DR for DMC27¶

1. Start earlier and publish earlier. Featured speakers, a draft schedule and early-bird tickets were all late in 2025, and early-bird sales almost didn't happen.
2. Fix the program shape before the CFP, then fill slots. Fewer parallel sessions, more breaks, panels with nothing against them.
3. Keep people together. Speaker dinner and Splash Awards both split the camp into sub-groups. DMC27 already dropped the speaker dinner; decide Splash Awards with this in mind.
4. We missed our size goal. The goal was 150+; ~80 came. Sponsors noticed ("reach smaller than 150 and smaller than before").
5. Reach outside the bubble. Newcomer-friendly sessions and non-developer formats were promised and not delivered.

What worked (continue)¶

• Social events: fondue, sledding, the icebreaker and the pub quiz. The two "games" helped newcomers and unexpected neighbours connect.
• Fondue as a paid add-on helped cover the budget (next time price it above cost; see budget).
• Pretalx for CFP and calendar: mentioned by almost everyone.
• Keynotes were strong and distinctive; session quality was high thanks to a dedicated review team.
• An authentic opening/closing ceremony.
• Marketing: newsletters and consistent branding "added a touch of uniqueness"; communication was much better than the year before.
• Team spirit: people knew their role, reused patterns from previous events instead of reinventing, and acted on the previous year's feedback.
• Good catering and a local social-events lead who handled venue, fondue and apéro bookings.

What held us back (stop)¶

• Too late overall. Featured sessions weren't published early enough and the early-bird phase wasn't planned; almost no early-bird tickets sold. No publication calendar.
• Unclear task lists and ownership.
• Combining DMC and the Splash Awards split the volunteer team in two and didn't bring many new attendees to DMC.
• The speaker dinner split a small camp into two groups, and core volunteers who weren't speaking felt left out. Several asked to cancel it or replace it with an inclusive social event. (DMC27 decision: no speaker dinner, speaker gift instead.)
• Too few breaks, and panels competing with other sessions.
• Opening wasn't at the very beginning of the event.
• Language barrier for some attendees.
• Not reaching outside the Drupal bubble.

Ideas raised (invent)¶

• Program shape: publish a draft schedule ASAP and accept the risk of changes; one big single-track room (Parsenn + Pischa combined) for keynotes, panels and featured talks; opening and closing slides prepared in advance; call 5-minute gaps "session switch" rather than "break".
• Format: 2 days only, or half days so people can ski or hike in the mornings; an onboarding/student track; a business day or format for non-developer roles; a "real" pub quiz.
• Audience: how do we reach people and speakers outside our bubble?
• Location: Davos is expensive and "a big question mark". Floated: another ski area, Ticino, Thun, Basel (accessible, cheap, good infrastructure), outside Switzerland (French Alps, Austria), or a DevDays-style call for hosts where the only requirement is mountains.
• Language: allow all Swiss languages with live captions/teleprompting.
• Tooling: a ticket system with a proper sales overview (Pretix was suggested; DMC27 uses Pretix).
• Team: work in small groups and only bring what's relevant to the sync; a shared plan with clear deadlines worked well and should be the default.

Next actions agreed (act)¶

• Fix the session mix in advance, e.g. 4 workshops, 10 long sessions, 4 panels, 4 keynotes, 8 short sessions, create a blueprint per day, then fill the slots.
• Define the structure of the org teams.
• Decide right away when and where the next camp happens.
• Ask what the most important "features" of the location are, and whether Davos is really the right place.

"Next camp" options discussed¶

Dot-voting leaned towards "in 2 years" and "elsewhere". Splash Awards International at DrupalCon Vienna raised the question of grouping Splash Awards CH with DE/AT. (Outcome: the team chose Davos in 2027 for the 10^th anniversary.)

2025 benchmarks (how the year actually ran)¶

Planning started Apr 2024 (go/no-go), kick-off May 2024, syncs roughly every 2-4 weeks, bi-weekly from Nov. Event was Mar 11-13, 2025.

Sponsor pipeline: ~35 companies actively worked, 12 confirmed, ~10 declined, ~13 never answered. Roughly 1 in 3 approached companies signed. Lessons:

• One owner per company. One prospect complained after being contacted by 3-4 different people.
• Reach sells. Sponsors explicitly cited the smaller audience. Real 2025 numbers plus a credible 2027 plan (headliners, sovereignty angle) are the answer; see the prospectus.
• We compete with other camps (Dev Days, DrupalCons) for the same agency budgets.
• Media partners (job boards, community news) came back for free and helped with reach.

Other practical learnings:

• Recording all rooms needs one volunteer per room just to start/stop; line them up early.
• Keynote travel from elsewhere in Europe was ~CHF 860 (flight ~200, train ~60, 3 hotel nights ~600).
• Badges and print were blocked for weeks waiting for sponsor SVGs; set a hard logo deadline (DMC27: Feb 1).
• Splash Awards needed ~25 submissions to work; 15 came in after a deadline extension.
• After-party venues may require a minimum drinks spend (~CHF 1,000 across all guests).
• Order non-alcoholic drinks; offer "bring your own lanyard".
• List the event on drupal.org, Meetup, LinkedIn, confs.tech, dev.events and developers-conferences-agenda early.