The very first WordCamp London is this weekend. Yay! That means 300 WordPressers will be descending on the capital to listen to presentations, talk WordPress, and meet their peers. If you’re coming to WordCamp London, here are some tips and some information to help you get by.

The venue

The conference is taking place at Bishopsgate Institute, which is across the road from Liverpool Street Station. To find it, come out of the station at the Bishopsgate exit, cross the road, turn left, walk down Bishopsgate a little and you’ll be right there.

Bishopsgate Institute, (image CC license Ewan Munro)

The sessions will take place in two rooms – the Great Hall, which is downstairs, and the Upper Hall, which is upstairs. There’ll be signage to get you around but if you get stuck you can ask one of the volunteers wearing a red WordCamp London t-shirt to help you out.

As well as having sessions in the Upper Hall, that’s also where you’ll find the catering and the sponsors.

Sessions

Tammie Lister speaking at WordCamp San Francisco 2013. Photo credit Sheri Bigelow & Kevin Conboy

WordPress has a broad ecosystem and we’ve tried to have a variety of sessions so that everyone comes away having learned something new. Developers will get their fill in the morning in the Great Hall with a trio of development presentations: Shipping Code for Fun and Profit, Developing for the New Media Manager, and The Magic of WordPress. If you run your website on WordPress and want to learn some new performance and debugging tricks, check out  Need for Speed at 11:30am in the Upper Hall, and Debugging WordPress at 2:30pm in the Great Hall.

There are plenty of talks to appeal to business owners – check out the Upper Hall from 4pm – 5:30pm, for insight from Ilona Filipi and David Coveney, and freelancers can get some tricks from David Lockie. You might also want to get some big media strategies and learn how the UK government are using WordPress for an intranet, from 9:30am – 10:30am in the Upper Hall. Themers are well catered for throughout the day, with two workshops, one for beginners and one for more advanced themers. There are also presentations from Rachel McCollin and Luke Oatham.

Content creators might be interested to learn about content marketing from Alex Denning, or hear Jessica Jones’ story about how she transformed her blog into a book.

Interested in BuddyPress? Learn about it from BuddyPress contributor Tammie Lister. And if you’re interested in your website’s accessibility, find out more about it from WordPress Accessibility guru Graham Armfield.

And there are some sessions that will suit just about anyone. We’re immensely proud to have Stockport-born, WordPress co-founder Mike Little to give a keynote presentation on his perspective of the past ten years of WordPress. We also have WordPress lead developer, Mark Jaquith, who’ll be sharing his experiences from the WordPress 3.6 release cycle. And to finish the day, Nikolay Bachiyski will round things off with his thoughts on learning.

As if that’s not enough, there are 10 lightning talks that cover pretty much every aspect of WordPress.

Catering

Catering will be provided at different points throughout the day. There won’t be any coffee or tea available at the venue in the morning, so grab your morning drinks from one of the many coffee shops around the venue.

Coffee and tea will be provided during the two breaks. These will be served in the Upper Hall. Lunch is also provided. If you have let us know that you have a specific dietary requirement then we’ll have your lunch available. Please only eat the gluten free/lactose free options if you ordered one.

Wifi

Wifi will be available but we ask you to use it respectfully. Please turn off Dropbox syncing, don’t stream media, don’t do voice or video chats, or download any large files. Please don’t connect with every single device that you own. Ask whether you really need to connect your phone, iPad, and laptop. There will be a number of attendees from overseas who don’t have data on their phone so if you have unlimited data on yours, think about using that instead of connecting to the network.

Party

After the event finishes, we will, in grand British style, head to the pub for drinks and chinwagging. The after party will be at Kings Stores, which is right around the corner from Bishopsgate Institute. We’ll be getting started at around 6pm. Food will be provided, and we’ll be issuing drinks tickets that you can use to claim drinks. We’ve booked two private rooms upstairs, but there is also a huge bar downstairs if you want to go somewhere quieter for more chatting.

Contributor Day

Contributor Day starts at 11am on Sunday and takes place at Mozilla Spaces. A number of representatives of the different teams at WordPress will be around to help you get started with contributing to WordPress. If you’ve signed up using the form then your space is guaranteed. We still have a few places left so do sign up. Don’t worry if you’ve never contributed to WordPress before, we’d love to have you there! This is the perfect opportunity to get started.

So that’s it – we’ll see you all on Saturday! If you have any questions you can tweet us @WordCampLondon and on the day you’ll find volunteers milling around in red WordCamp London t-shirts.