This past week I was part of the organizing team who hosted almost 300 WordPress enthusiasts to Ottawa for the first national WordCamp Canada,
Until now, WordCamps in Canada had always been run as local events in cities across the country. This was the first attempt to bring everyone together for one event.
We’ll wait for all the feedback forms to be submitted, but from what I’m hearing, the attendees, speakers, sponsors, and volunteers all had a great time!
Here’s a quick personal recap (this does not represent the views of the organizing committee)
Venue
The Infinity Convention Centre in Ottawa is a great venue. Their staff were a pleasure to deal with throughout the planning and execution of this camp! The building is beautiful, and well, we can’t say enough about the great food that chef put together. I can’t begin to count how many people commented on the food service at the Infinity.
Sessions
Honestly, I didn’t see a single full session the entire weekend. There was too much running around to do. I’ll just have a long list of videos to watch once they’re posted. I heard lots of great reviews in the hallway though!
Speaking of which, yes, the sessions at WordCamp Canada were recorded. There’s some work to be done before the videos can be posted, but we’ll announce as soon as they are!
Contributor Day
Love a camp with a contributor day, and Paul Paul Bearne and Ryan Welcher put together a great one for this camp. I must congratulate Evan Herman from GoDaddy who cut days off the plugin review wait time!
Community
The best part, of course, was getting to meet so many new members of the WordPress community, and reconnect with friends I hadn’t seen in many years.
I’m glad some of you got to explore downtown Ottawa while you were here. It’s a beautiful city, and I was happy y’all got to see my hometown.
Volunteers
My role in this camp was as the volunteer coordinator. A huge thanks to the few dozen of you who lent a day or more of your time on site during the camp making sure everything ran smoothly! We could not have done this camp without you!
I’d specifically like to thank Rosie who led the photography team, since I realize putting together this post that I took surprisingly few photos all weekend! We’ll share all the official photos soon!
The Organizing Team
Shanta, Matt, Jamie, Kiera, Paul, Rick, Gina, Ryan – We did it. This camp was over a year in the making. It has been many more years that we’ve talked about doing this. Thank you for everything you did to make it a reality.
Now we can sleep.
