Hi everyone!<\/p>\n
On Friday night there was a WCMTL planning meeting at the Vanilla offices. Brendan Sera-Sriar<\/a>, Shannon Smith<\/a> and I (Jeremy Clarke<\/a>) attended. For now we will form the core team for this upcoming WordCamp, though we want to include everyone in the process.<\/p>\n This site (RSS feed<\/a>), the planning Google Group<\/a>, our Twitter account<\/a> and the Facebook Group<\/a> will all be updated with new information as it becomes official and things like tickets go on sale, so sign up to stay up to date! Below are summaries of the major points we discussed during the meeting.<\/p>\n We talked about some of the different dates already proposed and decided that late\/end of August would be best. The two potential weekends are Aug 21-22 or Aug 28-29. For now we are going to take advantage of the extra week of planning time and state the date as Aug 28-29<\/strong>, with the caveat that if a particularly awesome venue is available for the week before we may choose that instead.<\/p>\n We discussed our venue needs but didn’t come to any firm conclusions. Our ideal would be to find a university\/cegep venue that already has all the AV and seating stuff that we’ll need, but we don’t know of any that are available at this point. The building Vanilla<\/a> lives in has offered us several large rooms and we can use this as a fallback location but it would require renting chairs and organizing all the projectors\/screens\/audio equipment ourselves. The Vanilla building is also unlikely to offer a single room that could hold all participants for big meetings (i.e. seating 150 people). We could live without a giant room and big shared talks if necessary.<\/p>\n Any leads on educational or other venues that would be free or affordable are very welcome, if you know someone WordPress-friendly at a Montreal university or Cegep please get in touch.<\/p>\n The website for this year will use the same domain and structure as last years, http:\/\/wordcampmontreal.org<\/a><\/strong> but with some aesthetic changes to make it feel like a different event (and obviously updates to all content).<\/p>\n Shannon has offered to be in charge of press releases and press relations and will work with me (Jeremy) on the website content.<\/p>\n Like last year tickets will be sold through EventBrite<\/a> (they will probably have a similar price, 35$)<\/p>\n We are hoping to get people signed up as early as possible as volunteers. Volunteers will get free admission to the event but will be expected to put in several hours of incredibly fun work-time to compensate. You will also recieve bragging rights and free hugs from Brendan upon request. Once the site is relaunched for this year there will be a form where you can sign up.<\/p>\n Sponsorship will probably work mostly like last year. We discussed donation tiers and settled on a relatively obvious set of choices:<\/p>\n We also plan to offer a low-price sponsorship package for freelancers, $100 or $200, which won’t get your logo on the poster or website but will buy you a position on a special page of freelancers who care deeply about WordPress Community. There will be a limited number of these sponsorships for sale, probably 20, to ensure that everyone who invests in this idea can be featured on the resulting page. We will sell these packages via EventBrite, so they will be purchased instead of a ticket to the event and will get you into all activities. Special investors will also have a special sticker on their badges so everyone knows how sexy they are.<\/p>\n Anyone have feedback about the price of this freelancer package? 200$ woiuld mean less dependence on other sponsors and we could feature the list even more, but would\u00a0 obviously be less affordable for a lot of people.<\/p>\n We discussed several elements of the schedule for this WordCamp but agreed that the practical considerations listed above are more urgent and immediately in need of solving.<\/p>\n We didn’t come to a firm conclusion about whether this should be a one or two day event. Both have their benefits and it may depend on our venue.<\/p>\n We agreed that the schedule should feature as much balance between development and content-production as possible, and that we hope to have balanced speakers like last year or even better if possible.<\/p>\n Once the website is relaunched to reflect this new WordCamp there will be a form for speakers to enter their personal information and propose topics. We hope you will start thinking now about topics you would like to present and start working on your info about them. If you can, prepare the following information about your topic:<\/p>\n your name, For examples and information please go look at last year’s schedule which is up on the site now: http:\/\/wordcampmontreal.org\/schedule\/<\/a><\/p>\n Ma.tt is going to be in town for much of July and he wants to hang out with us! http:\/\/ma.tt\/2010\/06\/to-montreal\/<\/a><\/p>\n Moving WordCamp itself up a month isn’t really feasible but we can certainly have some warmup get-togethers in the meantime. We will be in touch with matt and with this group and the facebook one to announce some social get-togethers (at a bar) and hopefully at least one informational meetup next month. <\/strong><\/p>\n Thanks for your interest in WordCamp and we hope you can all be involved as Sponsors, Speakers and Volunteers! Keep in touch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Date<\/h3>\n
Venue<\/h3>\n
Website<\/h3>\n
Volunteers<\/h3>\n
Sponsors<\/h3>\n
\n
Schedule<\/h3>\n
Speakers<\/h3>\n
\nyour bio,
\ntalk name,
\ntalk description.<\/p>\nMeetups in the meantime<\/h3>\n
Lots to do, lets get started!<\/h3>\n