First thing this morning (a little past midnight UK time), a guy by the name of Chris Borgia posted a campaign on indiegogo. The campaign, "Film Laracon" is pretty self-explanatory. In the project summary he pointed out that there were no plans for the talks to be recorded, meaning those of us unable to attend Laracon would be left out of the mix. As it happens, Chris already owns the relatively wide range of gear necessary to record a conference and he'd managed to secure a slot on the guest list, so all he had to cover was the cost of a hotel and parking at a total of $560.
Can't make it to #laracon? We can record videos of the talks, but we need a little extra help from you! Lend a hand? igg.me/at/laracon
— Laravel (@laravelphp) February 7, 2013
As someone living in the UK without a Passport I didn't have a hope in hell of actually being there, even if I wanted to be. With that in mind, when I saw @laravelphp's tweet, I had to do something about it. $20 was enough to get me early access to the recordings via FTP; translate that to real money (GBP) and you're left with about 13 quid. I'm not generally the superstitious type but hey, I didn't wanna jinx it so I rounded up to 25 anyway.
I made my donation at 00:19. After that, a couple more people donated as you'd expect. Then someone came along and threw in no less than two hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah, you read that right. I won't give their name because they changed the privacy setting to not disclose the amount, but they deserve a bloody medal.
Needless to say, their very generous donation brought the running total to be $6 short of the target. I took to IRC to say "Holy crap!" but someone else had already seen the donation. They went one step further with "holy crap on a stick", so I changed my mind. In the mean time, the odd number was driving me crazy so the race was on to donate that final 6 dollars.
Long story short, in the 25 minutes since going live, the campaign had already reached its goal. Looks like a few others had the same idea as me though - by 30 minutes the total was almost $100 over the initial target. Amazing what difference a community can make!
So thanks to Chris, the indiegogo contributors and of course the organisers for letting him in, we'll all be able to watch the conference from the comfort of our armchairs (or office chairs) as and when we want. For those of you that can't donate for whatever reason or didn't opt for early access, videos will likely be released daily, one talk at a time.
As I sit here typing this now at 04:30, the pot is overflowing by 345USD, thus bringing the total to $906. Kinda makes me wish I didn't donate that extra 6 dollars now... There's still plenty of time to contribute though. If you want to be credited, get first dibs on the footage or even just say "thanks" with your wallet, Let's Film Laracon is "open" 'til 13th February (next Wednesday).