What organizing a WordCamp is really like

Hi. I’m Chris, the lead organizer of WordCamp Salt Lake City.

This is my second year as lead organizer. Many of you may not know this, but WordCamps put a term limit on lead organizers to prevent people from burning out as well as to keep a steady influx of fresh ideas coming in, so this is also my last year as lead organizer. I’ve done other roles in the past, and I co-organized with Mike Hansen the two years before I took the helm.

Most of the time, you don’t get to see the inner workings of a conference. You arrive on the day, get your badge, and are overwhelmed by new ideas to learn, people to meet, swag, food and maybe an afterparty. Then, a little like Santa Claus, it’s gone, and you’re left wondering what just happened. It usually takes me a couple of days to decompress and fully let the ideas settle in my brain after a conference, WordCamp or otherwise.

WordCamps are a little different though. Most of the tools and resources are out in the open. The WordCamp organizer’s handbook is publicly available, for example, with everything you ever need to know about running a WordCamp. And the #community-events channel in the WordPress Slack is open to anyone who wants to drop in.

Despite this, and the awesome support from the WordPress Community Support team, running a WordCamp is hard work. It’s not difficult work — in that none of the actual tasks are particularly hard or complicated — there are just a lot of them, and they’re all kind of happening simultaneously. It’s like balancing nine bowls of soup on the end of a rake balanced on top of an ichthyosaur’s head. Eventually, you might get to put one of the bowls down, sometimes you need to pick a new bowl up, your team is there to carry some of the bowls for you, but ultimately you need to make sure that all the bowls get to their destination safely, without falling or breaking.

I’ve had days where the entire day was spent working on WordCamp SLC. I’ve had weeks of these days. An entire day of working exclusively on WordCamp might look like:

  • Tweaking the theme for the WCSLC website
  • Managing social media
  • Communicating with/confirming speakers
  • Communicating with/confirming sponsors
  • Arranging swag
  • Working on speaker gifts
  • Shuffling the schedule
  • Coordinating with the venue
  • Organizing catering
  • etc, etc, etc

What’s more, a full day of working on WordCamp often involves creating a todo list, checking things off the todo list and, over the course of the day, adding new things to your todo list, so that, by the end of the day, you end up back where you started.

Among those things, there are a few things that I, personally, take very seriously and have certain expectations. As someone who is gluten-free and vegan, I want to make sure that the food we have at WCSLC provides options for those of us who don’t eat meat, don’t eat wheat, or both. I’ve been told that having an organizer on a WordCamp organizing team who’s gluten-free and vegan usually means that the Camp will have the best food options, and we’ve been thanked many times for having good vegetarian/vegan options since we started making that a priority. Besides working with Sugarhouse BBQ for the meat-eaters, we work with Cali’s Natural Foods who partners with the owner of Vertical Diner, Vertical Pizza and Sage’s Cafe to provide a plant-based option for lunch.

I’m also acutely aware, as many of you are, of the diversity problems in the tech industry. We’re not immune to that here in Salt Lake City, and I know that I have had benefits that I might not have had if I was of a different gender orientation, sexual orientation, skin color, marital status, native language, or physical ability. I actively engage members of the WordPress community outside of our local community to come to Utah to inspire our local community the way I was inspired at my first WordCamp, which led me to continue to volunteer and speak year after year. I also want to cultivate our local speaker pool and provide opportunities for members of our local community to present. We are lucky in that we never have a shortage of fantastic, talented speakers in our local community. I understand that seeing people talk with whom you can associate and identify helps to get more people interested and involved with more diverse backgrounds, so I try hard to have speakers and topics that represent a variety of different groups and skill sets.

Maybe you’ve wondered how WordCamps are financed, and how we pay for things like booking the venue, swag, rentals, and more. Most WordCamps are cost neutral. Any money a WordCamp makes goes back into the camp itself. If there is revenue made, it goes to the WordPress Foundation. The WordPress Foundation, in turn, uses that money to help fund other WordCamps or WordPress meetups. If we’re ever short on our budget (which we try not to let happen, of course), the WordPress Foundation is a safety net to ensure that no one has to pay for anything WordPress-related out-of-pocket. What’s more, the WordPress community has built tools into WordCamp sites that allow invoices and all that money stuff to be handled by WordPress Community Support — for which I am extremely thankful. The last thing I want to be doing is dealing with someone else’s money.

Much of the day-to-day work of running a WordCamp is done in the WordPress admin of the WordCamp site, in email, or in the WordCamp planning channel in Slack. I use Google Inbox’s ability to “bundle” emails into folders, so all my WordCamp stuff can be filed in the WordCamp bundle, so everything relating to WordCamp or WCSLC get’s automatically filtered into that bundle (most of the time). I check that every day…sometimes multiple times per day, depending on what’s going on. Right now, on my list of things to do before the 23rd is make reservations for the speaker dinner, wait for the camera kits to show up from WordPress Community Support, wait for the speaker gifts to arrive, figure out how the sponsor tables at the event will work, come up with a “playbook” for volunteers and organizers for day-of planning, and follow up with our sponsors and make sure they have everything they need.

I am involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City because I am passionate about WordPress and Open Source. Open Source Software gave me the tools to get started in development and WordPress and the WordPress community provided the tools to excel and learn. WordCamps are a way for me to give back to the community. I love being able to spotlight local Utah WordPress businesses and developers. In the end, it’s about making a space where we can hang out together and geek out about WordPress, where we can meet people who are doing similar things, and where we can learn new ideas that we can take home and research more deeply. WordCamps can also be about developing yourself professionally — two of the jobs I’ve had started at WordCamp Salt Lake City — which is one of the reasons I love that our new venue is a local coworking space that is similarly dedicated to being a community hub for developers and entrepreneurs.

If you are interested in volunteering or helping to organize WordCamp Salt Lake City — either this year or in the future — get in touch. I’d love to chat more about my experience helping to put on this amazing event for the community.

Call for Volunteers

WordCamps run smoothly thanks to our amazing team of organizers and volunteers. No matter what your level of experience in volunteering for an event like this is (including none at all!), you are welcome to join an amazing team of WordPress-lovers and help keep this show on the road.

All volunteers get free admission to the event!

The call for volunteers is now closed. Thanks to all who signed up!

WordCamp Salt Lake City 2017 is over. Check out the next edition!