BarCamp - How to Run Your Own/Food + Drink

• Grocery delivery tends to be a good way to get a lot of items at once. Most supermarkets do delivery and they can deliver just before the barcamp or even during the barcamp.
• In the UK, only Sainsburys and Ocado deliver to the business addresses
• Some barcamps charge extra for the food and drink, this is only advisable when budgets are extremely tight and there's a range of shops close by
• Drinks specially beers, wine, etc. can usually be paid for by sponsorship

Dealing with alcohol

Depending on the number of attendees and the venue, you should think hard about how much alcohol you provide, when and how.

If you stop serving alcohol early, people will just take a lot of bottles and hide them away to drink later.

Generally, at BarCampLondon (6, 7 & 8), the organisers have given attendees a certain number of drink tokens: usually two. Then you start serving drinks after people have finished eating. By the time the people who aren't planning to stay overnight leave, you can start allowing more drinks, but giving them out to people. This way you can not give them to people who look a bit too drunk already, and if you are asked, you only give them out to non-drunk people. Using this approach, although we have had people who we thought might get very drunk and cause problems, this has not actually happened.

If you can get someone to make cocktails: all the better. BarCamp has shown one thing quite strongly—some geeks sure do like mixing their drinks!