WordCamp Cape Town 2017 debrief

I’ve said this to a few people already, but if I had known what it takes to lead a WordCamp, I might not have jumped to the opportunity.

(who am I kidding, of course I would have, but that’s another story).

I had originally planned to only be on the organising team for 2017 and had applied lead WordCamp Cape Town 2018, thinking that would be a good way to see what was involved first. However due to some setbacks in the life of the 2017 lead I was asked if I’d be prepared to take over. As with all opportunities that come my way, I grabbed that bull by the horns.

Preparing the team

The first thing I did when I knew I was leading 2017 was put out the call for organisers. I was fortunate that I had a mixed group of experienced and new organisers on my team. I was also blessed with a team who was not only prepared to put in the time needed to get the job done, but on whom I could rely on 100%. I’d like to think I’m fairly good at delegating (although WordCamp has taught me I can do that better) but every team member stepped up and tackled their respective tasks admirably. If you’re part of the WordCamp Cape Town 2017 organising team and you’re reading this, thank you very much for everything you did. I appreciate all your hard work and I hope you’ll be joining me again next year.

Planning

The organsing team met fairly early on in person, mostly in order to get to meet everyone face to face, but also to talk about what we want to achieve with WordCamp. We didn’t really have an overall theme or goal, something that I plan to rectify next year, but we were mostly all on the same page. We met again in person one last time and then all planning moved to digital means.

As a team we agreed to using Slack for real time communication and a WordPress.com hosted p2 for any other form of communication. Initially these forms of communication were private, but after listening to Jenny Wong’s WordCamp Europe talk I decided that we should make the slack channel and p2 blog public. The rest of the team agreed and I’m glad we did so, as we were able to get some feedback from our future attendees before the event.

That’s not to say that things went perfectly. Two of our organising team stepped down during the course of planning and we had to do what we could to either find replacements or share the workload among ourselves. We moved the date of WordCamp out by a month from its usual date, but didn’t factor in the effect this would have on members of our team who would be flying to WooConf. I’m happy to say that we did however manage to get everything arranged in time and eventually the day arrived.

WordCamp

I’m happy to report that the general consensus from folks I have spoken to (and the surveys that went out afterwards) was that WordCamp Cape Town 2017 was a success. I’ve already started assimilating the survey responses with plans to either improve on or rectify some of the mistakes I made. If I’ve learned nothing else from WordCamp it’s that you can have the best venue and speakers in the world, but if you haven’t catered for everyone’s needs when it comes to food, you’d better be prepared to take some flak.

Budget

Managing the budget was probably one of the biggest headaches the team and more specifically myself and our budget wrangler, had to deal with this year. We were only able to raise about half of what we had raised previously in non Global Community sponsorships so it meant we had to make some hard decisions about where to spend our funds. Fortunately we made the correct decisions when it came to trimming the budget and we actually ended up with a profit of about R 11 500, which I paid over to WordCamp central this morning, to be used for other WordCamps around the world.

You can take a look at the final budget here.

Once big risk we took this year was opening a local bank account, to be able to process ticket sales in local currency as opposed to USD. I think at the end of the day this worked out pretty well, but it added the extra headache of having to worry about payment processing and banking fees, which we didn’t even think about.

Wrap up

Since my first in 2015 I always look forward to a WordCamp, its a great place to meet new WordPress folks, catch up with old friends and celebrate the local community. Now that I have first hand experience in making all that happen, I’m excited to improve for next year. However, WordCamp Cape Town 2018 will be taking a slightly different path. A few of the organising team have already discussed an idea to run a more stripped down WordCamp, with more of a focus on learning, sharing and contributing. We’ve had so many great WordCamps in the past that I think it’s a good time to change things up a little.

To all the people who volunteered their time this year, the organising team, speakers, volunteers and anyone else who helped make it happen, I thank you again. If you are reading this and you want to be a part of 2018, please visit and subscribe to updates on the https://wpcapetown.co.za/ site. As soon I publish this post I’ll be completing my application to lead WordCamp Cape Town 2018 and once that’s approved, I’ll be posting a call for organisers on the WP Cape Town site.

Finally, to those of you who may be reading this internationally, if you have the means I cordially invite you down to Cape Town for WordCamp next year. I promise this time I’ll get the food right 😉