Charles Stricklin

My last few months as the lead organizer of WordCamp Dallas have been fraught with fun, excitement, worry, obstacles, bureaucracy and general mayhem and confusion. One question that keeps coming up is a variation of, “How do I organize a WordCamp in _______________?”

So, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned in the hopes that maybe others will set out to spread the WordCamp experience elsewhere.

Step 1. Gauge interest.

The explosion of blogging over the last decade pretty much ensures that someone will be interested in coming to your WordCamp, just not a lot of people. You need to ask around to gauge the interest level of those in the surrounding area, since they’ll make up the bulk of your audience. Is there one or more colleges and/or universities nearby? Are there technology companies nearby? Is there a WordPress Meetup goup for the area? Do a search for blogs located in your area. If there isn’t enough interest in your hometown for a WordCamp, widen your circle and consider organizing or helping organize one in a nearby town or city. If there is, proceed to…

Step 2. Determine the overall structure of your WordCamp.

If you live in a large metropolitan area like London, Seattle, Tokyo, etc., you might want to consider actually organizing your WordCamp not unlike an actual conference where speakers are selected, scheduled and publicized in advance. You could organize the event into one “track” where sessions inhabit a single auditorium and progress in a linear fashion, or you could have several “tracks” in multiple rooms - one for beginners and one for developers for example.

Another way to structure the event is pure “BarCamp” style, where topics and speakers are not chosen in advance but instead come about organically from the ranks of the attendees. This is especially favorable when you’re dealing with smaller cities like Ruston, Louisiana; Sheffield, England or Edmonton, Canada… places where perhaps there’s one or more universities or some other reason why bloggers might congregate there, yet not large enough to warrant a full-blown conference. In other words, decide whether or not you’ll be dealing exclusively with locals, or whether people from across the country or across the world might want to attend.

If you’re encouraged at the prospect of people from outside your local area being in attendance, also consider making the event two or more days. If I live in London or Toronto, it’s a safe bet that people won’t mind flying in or, at least, driving from nearby areas. If you’re organizing an event in Starkville, Mississippi, count on making it only one day.

Step 3. Pick a weekend, and maybe even a few alternate weekends.

Weekends work better for unconferences. Company A might let employee B spend Thursday and Friday out of the office if it’s paying $2,000 to send him or her to a conference, but likely won’t for a free or $25 unconference. Besides, you want to attract people who are passionate about blogging and willing to pass up sleeping late Saturday morning or other weekend activities.

Pick a weekend that doesn’t clash with other events such as the Superbowl or Macworld Expo. There are several events where, if you schedule your WordCamp too close to theirs, they’ll win every time. Events such as TechCrunch, Gnomedex, South by Southwest, SOBCon, New Media Expo, Blog World Expo, Mesh, MacWorld Expo, just to name a few. Scheduling a WordCamp too close to Spring Break, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. are also bad ideas.

Also, don’t just pick one weekend, pick several as coverage. Maybe you hope Matt Mullenweg might speak and he’s not available on the weekend of your first choice. Maybe the venue you’d prefer has a piano recital booked that weekend. Be safe and choose alternative dates.

That should be enough to get you started

I’ll continue next time with venue selection, pricing and sponsors.

Tags: WordCamp

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 10:28 pm and is filed under WordCamp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.