NodeConf Fox Theatre Event Cancelled

NodeConf Adventure at Walker Creek Ranch is still on.

Today I had to cancel the NodeConf 2015 speaking event at The Fox Theatre. NodeConf Adventure at Walker Creek Ranch is still on and I encourage everyone to join us there.

NodeConf has been run by me out of my personal LLC for the last 5 years. The financial risk in running a conference is quite high, which is why a lot of conferences are backed by a consulting or media company. Many events lose money, but for myself and other independent organizers like Chris Williams that isn’t really an option since the loss falls on our personal finances. I’ve been lucky that for the last 5 years NodeConf sold out and I haven’t had much of a problem, until now.

I wanted NodeConf 2015 to be our biggest year ever. I booked a very large, and very expensive, venue. The Fox Theatre is beautiful and historic but that comes at a cost and even with this cancellation the deposit I’ll lose is more than I paid to rent the venue for JSFest for 5 days.

We had other production costs as well, Ben Michel has been putting together an amazing sound score and the venue audio, projection and other visuals have to be handled by the Fox which is quite expensive.

All this cost added up and we needed to hit a minimum of what we sold in 2014 (over 300) to make it happen which I thought would be easy considering the cost of the tickets is lower. Unfortunately that didn’t happen and before speakers started locking in flights and hotels I decided that the only responsible thing to do was to cancel the speaking event at the Fox Theatre and put all my remaining energy into NodeConf Adventure.

NodeConf Adventure is the fifth Node related event we’ve done at Walker Creek Ranch and the sixth event I’ve done there (CouchCamp in 2010 was the first). It’s a magical place and I don’t think I have it in me to cancel the opportunity to bring our community back there.

All tickets to the speaking event at the Fox Theatre are being refunded and all sponsors are being given the opportunity to shift their sponsorship to NodeConf Adventure or cancel. I’d like to apologize to any speakers who put work into NodeConf thus far and especially to Ben Michel who has been arranging an amazing musical performance I won’t have the pleasure of seeing.