Author: Ana Silva

Announcing the WordCamp London 2018 Schedule

Posted on by Ana Silva

We are delighted to announce WordCamp London’s 2018 schedule, and share with you the effort and celebration of a community over the course of a year.

This year you can expect another round of presentations, workshops, and panels, in a range of categories. As well as the more traditional Business, Design, Development, and Content, we also have a new Hot Topic category to highlight sessions which cover big current topics (the topics selected for this category are Gutenberg, GDPR, and Blockchain).

The 2018 schedule will include a range of presentations, workshops, and panels too, so you can always find a session to suit your mood.

View the schedule

Creating the Schedule

Attendees at WordCamp London 2016

As well as the effort of all the applicants, there is a huge effort backstage in the organising team to vet, rate, select and assemble sessions for the schedule. We’ve had an enormous 118 submissions this year, and many, many excellent applications, and it’s been incredibly hard to fit everything that we wanted to see.

Suffice to say, we’ve had to reject a number of applications we’d have loved to see on stage with us. This is always disappointing for us, and probably the most difficult aspect of organising the event. We thank everyone for their applications and encourage you to apply next year too.

A huge shout out to the Speakers team, Diane Wallace, Gary Jones, & Dan Maby for all of their hard work!

Petya Rayvoska at WordCamp London 2016

What’s next?

If you haven’t already, you should purchase a Conference ticket as we’ll soon sell out.

Once you’ve done that, you should consider joining us at Contributor Day, Friday 13th April, where we will spend the day together contributing back to WordPress.org across a range of teams.

If you’re feeling flush, there are also limited sponsorship options still available for those who can spare some cash and contribute financially towards the event.

Accessibility

If you have any specific requirement(s) you feel are not covered in our accessibility page, please reach out to us directly to explain what you will need. We are happy to work with you to ensure you have a comfortable, safe, and enjoyable experience at WordCamp London 2018.Tammie Lister & Dave Lockie at WordCamp London 2016

Gutenbar & PHP Upgrade Bar

As well as the variety of sessions available to you, you can also benefit from two new initiatives we’re trying this year; Gutenbar, an open and collaborative discussion and exploration of Gutenberg, and PHP Upgrade Bar, support and advice to ensure you’re running the most recent version of PHP your site can support.

More details about both of these initiatives will be announced shortly.

If you have any questions, get in touch at any time to let us know, and reach out to us on Twitter at @WordCampLondon.

The Call for Speakers is closed. Now what?

Posted on by Ana Silva

As the Call for Speakers has recently closed, we wanted to thank you all again for taking the time to apply to speak at WordCamp London.

We’ve had a huge number of submissions (118!), so we’re finding it very difficult to select the right presentations. We’d said we’d inform all speakers on the outcome of their application by 16th February, and unfortunately, this deadline wasn’t reached. We’re very sorry for the delay, and we are working hard to ensure we get this done by mid-next week.

The selection process

The speaker selection process involves several steps, some which need to be repeated in order to ensure the final schedule is representative of the community, and that adequate representation of minority groups is achieved.

It usually goes something like this;
– Blind voting – the organising team assign points to each talk based solely on the session title and description.
– Group discussion – the organising team reviews each talk (even the applications that scored the lowest average score)
– Tuning and iteration – the organising team takes into consideration representation across the community, ensuring we have equal representation across genders, skill-level, speaking experience, companies, etc.

It is crucial for us to do a group discussion after blind voting and to keep iterating on the schedule as we go along; blind voting is not a reliable way to ensure equal representation.

Please bear with us!

We have already let all applicants know about the delay. We will be announcing the schedule, and getting in touch with applicants again to let them know the outcome of their application very shortly.

If you have any questions or concerns about the application process, please get in touch.