Analytics unconference MeasureCamp Auckland returns to the CBD on 19 September

MeasureCamp Auckland 2026 will be held on Saturday 19 September at Sudima Auckland City, 63-67 Nelson Street, running from 10am to 5pm, according to the registration listing published by the organising group MeasureCamp Auckland. The listing places the event on the hotel's tenth floor.

The event is free to attend. The MeasureCamp Auckland website states that registration is still required because "numbers are strictly limited", and that tickets are released in batches "to provide everyone with a fair chance to register", with releases announced through the organisers' social channels and newsletter. At the time of checking, the registration page showed the current batch closed and pointed prospective attendees to the mailing list at auckland.measurecamp.org for the next release. Sponsors for the 2026 edition had not yet been named on the listing.

What distinguishes the event from a standard industry conference is that, on the morning of 19 September, nobody yet knows what will be discussed.

How the unconference format works

MeasureCamp describes itself as an unconference. The organiser's own explanation of the format is direct: at the start of the day the session board is blank, and "anyone can run a session, it can be a presentation, a discussion, or even a gameshow". When the board is declared open, attendees claim a time slot and a room by physically adding a session card to the board. There are no vendor pitches and no speaker line-up published in advance.

The structure is otherwise conventional enough to be planned around. When the format was first brought to Auckland in 2018, IT Brief New Zealand reported that the day was built from eight 30-minute session slots between 10am and 5pm, with attendees able to choose from as many as five sessions running concurrently at any one time. The published 2026 running time of 10am to 5pm matches that shape.

The format also carries an explicit social convention that MeasureCamp calls the rule of two feet: if an attendee finds they are neither contributing to nor learning from a session, they are expected to get up and go to another one.

Who runs it

MeasureCamp is a global volunteer movement rather than a commercial conference business. The MeasureCamp organisation states that the concept was conceived in mid-2012 as an alternative to traditional digital analytics conferences, drawing on the BarCamp model, and that the first event was held in London in September 2012 with 120 people. Its stated operating principle is that MeasureCamps are "run by the Digital Analytics community, for the Digital Analytics community", and that events are deliberately held on a Saturday so that only people who genuinely want to be there attend.

The movement has grown substantially. MeasureCamp's own 2026 calendar page records 26 MeasureCamps held worldwide during 2025, including four new cities — Belgrade, Washington DC, Mexico City and Delhi — and states that 11 editions were confirmed for 2026 at the time of writing, with the organisation hoping to reach 30 or more.

The Auckland edition is run by a local volunteer organising committee operating under the MeasureCamp banner. New Zealand's first MeasureCamp was held on 16 June 2018 at the TVNZ Television Centre on Victoria Street West, and IT Brief reported at the time that it sold out. The event has moved venue repeatedly since: the MeasureCamp Auckland site records the 2024 edition — billed as the fifth — at Stanley Street Agency in Parnell on 21 September, and the 2025 edition at Auckland University of Technology on 27 September. The 2026 move to Sudima Auckland City marks a shift from campus and agency premises to a hotel conference floor.

Who it's for

The audience is digital analytics and measurement practitioners. MeasureCamp's global material describes an attendee mix of analytics practitioners, conversion optimisation specialists, marketers and data scientists, and positions the day as a chance to network with peers, consultants and vendors in a small discussion-group setting.

The organisers apply one notable filter. The MeasureCamp Auckland ticketing page states that organisers "reserve the right to restrict and withdraw tickets from Digital Analytics vendors (to prioritise users of Digital Analytics)" — a deliberate mechanism to keep the room weighted towards practitioners rather than sellers.

The venue

Sudima Auckland City sits at 63-67 Nelson Street in the western Auckland CBD. Sudima describes it as a 4.5-star hotel located directly opposite the New Zealand International Convention Centre and within walking distance of the central city's shopping, dining and entertainment precincts.

The hotel's meeting inventory is concentrated on Level 10, which is where the MeasureCamp listing places the event. Sudima's meetings and events page lists two conference rooms on that floor, Hauraki and Waitematā, each 104 square metres when fully open and each divisible into two smaller rooms of roughly 52 square metres. Ceiling height is listed at 2.4 metres. Capacities run to 88 theatre-style or 90 cocktail for each full room, and the hotel states the floor can accommodate up to 110 guests depending on the layout chosen. Both rooms are described as having harbour and city views.

For an unconference the relevant figure is not the theatre capacity but the number of separately usable spaces: four, if both rooms are divided. That is a tighter set of parallel tracks than the five concurrent sessions reported at the 2018 Auckland edition, and a smaller footprint than the university campus used in 2025.

As a Saturday event in the CBD, the day falls outside weekday commuter patterns. The hotel is a short walk from the Nelson Street and Hobson Street corridor and the convention centre precinct, and Sudima lists on-site accommodation for attendees travelling from outside Auckland.

Why it matters for New Zealand MICE

MeasureCamp is a working example of an event format New Zealand's business events sector sees relatively little of. Its economics are inverted compared with a standard conference: attendance is free because sponsors underwrite it, the labour is volunteer, the programme costs nothing to assemble because it does not exist until the morning, and demand is managed by capping registrations and releasing them in batches rather than by pricing.

It also demonstrates a use case for hotel meeting floors that is easy to overlook — a Saturday, a single day, a community organisation with no professional conference organiser, and a requirement for several small divisible rooms rather than one large plenary space. Sudima Auckland City's Level 10 configuration, with two rooms each splitting into two, maps onto that requirement more closely than a single large ballroom would.

And it is durable. The event has been staged in Auckland on and off since 2018 across at least four different venues, sustained entirely by a volunteer committee and sponsorship, while the global network it belongs to has grown from one London event in 2012 to 26 editions worldwide in 2025. For a sector that measures success in repeat business, a community-run event that keeps coming back for eight years without a ticket price is a data point worth noting.