WordCamp London 2018 is on the horizon: Call for Organisers

We can’t quite believe it, but that time of year has rolled around again! Behind the scenes, the WCDLN organising team is getting down to business and beginning the first stages of organising the next event.

We’ll be posting dates and venue details as soon as possible, but for now, we wanted to take this time to call out to any organisers eager to join us.

What to expect

As an organiser of WordCamp London, you’ll be expected to dedicate a portion of your weekly time towards the event. We don’t know how many hours this adds up to. But, depending on your role, demands on you will change throughout the organising process and you may find yourself inundated one week and with nothing to do the next.

We do ask that, however you do it, you contribute consistently and communicate with your team adequately. Organising an event for 600+ people is no small feat, and all that we ask is that you commit to it from the beginning, and maintain that commitment throughout.

Take a look at this post for a full list of roles and responsibilities in the WordCamp London organising team. Although some roles are already filled, every major section of the event is run by a team (Speakers, Sponsors, Budget, Volunteers, etc) so we will endeavour to place you in a team of your choice.

Interested in joining us?

That’s exciting and we’re really grateful for your time! Please email us at london@wordcamp.org with the following information:

  1. Why you’d like to get involved? (A brief explanation is enough!)
  2. If you’ve been involved in organising meetups, or WordCamps previously, please let us know and specify which ones.
  3. Which team you’d be interested in joining?

We’ll then be in touch as soon as we can to onboard you to the team.

We’re holding our first organisers meeting on Monday 18th September at 7:30 PM BST in the UK-WP-COMMUNITY Slack team, in the #wcldn channel. (Not in the channel? Join here)

As always, our meetings will be held in the open, and our organising process will be as transparent as possible.

2017 Debrief

I started organising the 2017 edition knowing it would be my last year. WordCamps have a two-year rotation for every lead organiser, and as I have now lead 2016 and 2017, it was time for me to hand over.

It was hard letting go of a project that I’d grown so attached to and I was worried WordCamp London might not have a lead organiser after I left. For me to give it up happily and not worry, meant having the confidence in the team.

Every year that I have led a WordCamp, I created a specific goal for the organising team. In 2016 our goal was accessibility, and making WordCamp London the most accessible event it could possibly be. With that, I asked the whole team to come up with any accessibility improvements within our means, and go with it.

In 2017, I drew up a new goal: to create a living legacy. With that, I realised that I needed to accept that the event would outgrow my time with it and the best thing I could do was to create a smooth transition from one organiser to the next. To give the event the best chance of outliving me, we had to ensure that the information and decisions were not lost and were properly documented and accessible.

Organising Team

2017 was an almost copy of the 2016 event. The organising team doubled; from 7 to 14, and many of organisers were organising a WordCamp for the first time. The reason we took on more people was because we wanted to reduce the pressure of any one role and spread the amount of work more evenly, as well as the time commitment required from each person.

We also added new roles; Runner & Handbook. The Runner role was able to step in and offer help whenever they could.

The handbook team were tasked with writing a localised handbook. Think of it as a love letter to future organisers and check it out wcldn.wordpress.com. It is not finished, or final, but the idea is that you can see why we do stuff, and have some context for the decisions we made. There’s a history trail here, which is – admittedly – a bit patchy in parts.

With the conscious decision to add in more organisers, we paired organisers so that each group had someone who ran the year before and someone new to the group. This was to create knowledge share pools and help onboard more organisers.

Communication

We also continued the team’s tradition of organising in the open with a WordCamp London channel in the UK WP Community Slack workspace. It meant that anyone could talk to an organiser, watch our discussions and weekly meetings play out, and inform us of any potential issues before they became problems. What is really cool is that some of the people who lurked in the channel became organisers because they were actively helping us already.

Working with more people creates different problems. Last year it was a small team, so keeping in contact and being aware of everyone was easy. When you have a bigger team, finding times that suit all schedules is hard. We used a P2 to keep track of any larger issues and asked everyone to post weekly updates regardless of the amount of work they did so we knew if people were struggling or needed help. We also used the P2 to post our weekly update notes so that anyone who wasn’t around for the meeting could catch up.

Another major change was the creation of the Playbook. It was after the team got annoyed at the amount of repeated questions I had about the status of vendors and speakers, that they suggested I wrote the answers down somewhere. We had spreadsheets and documents all over our shared folder, but finding one answer quickly when you were not the person responsible for that part of the event was difficult.

We found by creating a document that had all the concrete answers, it enabled the team to check what things were set in stone and what issues needed to still be worked on. We also realised we could use the Playbook to confirm with vendors such as the venue managers who used it to agree room requirements. We also sent it to all the volunteers so they knew exactly what the organising team plans were, and so they had a good idea of how we expected the event to run.

At the last minute, we decided to print these and place hard copies in every track; at the control desk; and in the organisers room, for those who wanted one. It meant that any person could find out what was expected and had been agreed upon. When the afternoon tea cakes didn’t show up, I was able to flick to the book and check what we had agreed with the vendors.

Printed copies of the Playbook

The difference the playbook made was tenfold. In 2016 I felt like a headless chicken, and it showed. I was exhausted by the end of the event because everyone was asking me questions.

In 2017, I ended up being worried about the lack of questions people had for me. Brain dumping everything I was expecting, and that the team had agreed, meant people could self-organise and take an initiative with the information they had in the Playbook. It made for a very relaxed event to organise, and I hope it showed.

Budget

We had the same commitment to accessibility as 2016, but we found that sponsorships were harder to find this year.

What I think worked to our advantage was the openness of our budget, and with the accounts all finalised, we have created a summarised budget.

You can also find the full budget here.

Beady eyed readers will notice we made a profit of £857.37 which, like all other WordCamps, will go back into the global community fund for other WordCamps to use.

Team Effort

I want to thank the organising teams that worked with me both on 2016 and 2017 editions of WordCamp London.

Many people have thanked me for the event, but it was truly a team effort.

To give you a taste of what it was like working with the team here are some memorable moments:

  • There was a moment this year when one of the team members fell ill and was hospitalised two weeks prior to the event. I was crazy stressed, and debating how I was going to take on the work that this person was doing, when the team came on Slack and said to me “What do you want me to take over?”I did not have to ask the team to pitch in and help out, they came and asked how they could help.
  • The amount of times the team vetoed my suggestions was often. One that sticks in my mind is when I suggested that t-shirt design should be on the left breast like a school crest and the team vetoed the idea.
  • The pie filling discussions we had.
  • The team and some volunteers came into London a day early and stayed up with me  all night to sticker up all the allergies onto badges, arrange them alphabetically, check we had the correct signage, highlight missing signage, and put an express order into the printers.
  • Running out to by fabric to hide some terrible signage the venue had.

This is some examples of how organising WordCamp London has been a team effort and an absolute joy. I could talk for hours more about my adventures with the team.

The team helped me create an event I am proud of. Without them, it would have not been possible. They constantly helped lift multiple weights from my shoulders and I can not thank the team enough for their willingness to organise the event with me.

Final Note

I am sad to be stepping back from WordCamp London organising, but I am also very proud of the event that we have created.

To the future organising team,

Have faith in yourselves, the way I have faith in you. I will be cheering you all on from the sidelines.

To the sponsors and vendors,

It has been a blast! Thank you for giving us the means to put on an event that will always be dear to me.

To everyone,

Thank you for all your support. It has been a great honor to lead the event for the pass 2 years and I can’t wait to join you all as an attendee!

Every session now has the video, slides and transcriptions published so please go and see any sessions you missed at the event.

I can’t wait to see how this event develops and what the community does in the future.

Over and out from me.

Jenny

Here’s what the community said about WordCamp London 2017

Over the last few weeks since WordCamp London, you’ve all been putting pen to paper and sharing your thoughts and feedback about the event. We really appreciate your time and effort in putting these ideas together and sharing them with us and with the rest of the community. Your feedback is extremely important to us because it’s the only way we know if we’re creating an event that works for you.

Keep them coming, and if we’ve missed your review, just comment below and we’ll add it. Alternatively, please email a link to london@wordcamp.org. Continue reading Here’s what the community said about WordCamp London 2017

Tell us what you thought: post-event attendee survey

WordCamp London 2017 is over and thank you to everyone who joined us for three fantastic days at London Metropolitan University. As a community-led event, feedback is really important to us. It helps us improve our organising process and ensures you – our attendees – are able to tell us exactly what you thought and how we can do it better next time.

Please take a moment to answer our post-event survey.

Thank you in advance. We really appreciate your time!

WordCamp London 2017 wapuu Continue reading Tell us what you thought: post-event attendee survey

Announcing our Dress Circle sponsors

 

Pragmatic is a Brighton-based WordPress specialist agency transforming the way that companies operate online around the world. Our friendly in-house team of developers, designers and UX experts deliver refined and focused WordPress projects to suit a wide range of requirements, expectations and budgets.

We’re passionate about building with WordPress and creating a happy, nurturing working environment for our team. Our approach towards web strategy and development is iterative and focuses on maintaining flexibility and agility wherever possible, leveraging the power of the wonderfully pragmatic WordPress ecosystem for your benefit.

 

At YITH we develop innovative WordPress themes and plugins for WooCommerce based sites. For years our philosophy has been based on simplicity and effectiveness as basic concepts required in any professional online business.

Our crown jewel, that makes us proud, is our high-quality support service, through which we take care of our customers day-by-day, never as a number, but as people with faces, names and a personal history that we deeply care for.

Yoast helps you to get the most out of your website! You might know our Yoast SEO plugin; with over 6 million active installs, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins worldwide.

At Yoast, we believe in holistic SEO: not just one aspect of a website, but all aspects are important and should, be as good as possible. All awesome websites have three things in common: they’re easy to use, contain the right information, and they’re fast and reliable. The bonus is, that if you do all that right, a website becomes easier to find as well!

WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. WPML powers simple blogs as well as corporate and enterprise sites.

WPML allows users to translate everything in the site, including content, menus, widgets and even theme and plugin texts. WPML powers over 500,000 commercial websites from all over the world. More information about going multilingual can be found at WPML.org

We are looking for talent. If you are a smart programmer you are welcome to contact us here: http://wpml.org/home

 

Are you coming to WCLDN alone and want to meet new people?

Meet new people at WordCamp London 2017

Earlier this year we had a great suggestion from an attendee about creating designated areas where those who have come to WordCamp London alone, and want to meet new people, can find each other and network.

If you’re someone who’ll be attending WordCamp London 2017 by yourself, or even if you’re with a group, we’ll have designated areas where you can make new connections throughout the following days and times: Continue reading Are you coming to WCLDN alone and want to meet new people?

Contributor Day tickets are sold out for WordCamp London 2017!

We’re having 100 contributors at WCLDN’s Contributor Day

We started with 100 Contributor Day tickets and we’ve just sold our very last one!

If you’re participating in Contributor Day on Friday 17th March, we’re really looking forward to a jam-packed day with a diverse selection of teams available for you to join.

See the entire schedule and teams here.

If you’ve claimed a ticket, but are no longer able to attend, please release your ticket so others may have the opportunity to attend in your place.

Find out all about our Boxes sponsors: A Walk On The Woo Side

What is WooCommerce? 

WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It began back in 2008 when Mike Jolley and Jay Koster saw an opportunity to bring eCommerce to WordPress the open source way, rallying the power of the WordPress developer community.

With 20M+ downloads and 1.7M active stores worldwide (via BuiltWith) it has seen incredible growth and uptake.

Continue reading Find out all about our Boxes sponsors: A Walk On The Woo Side