The Activities Room

At WordCamp London, we’re lucky to be in the position of building on a series of successful past editions and we’re always thinking of ways to keep up the high standards and add new things to the mix.

Last year, our ‘Activities Room’ quietly tucked away from the main tracks served as a place for people to break out, play some board games, or do some work.

What to expect in the Activities Room this year

This year, the Activities Room will have three events happening at selected times and dates: Happiness Bar, PHP Upgrade Bar, and last but not least, Gutenbar.

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Welcome our first group of speakers!

WordCamp London returns to the London Metropolitan University from 13 to 15 April 2018, and it brings together, on one stage, more than 40 speakers eager to share their knowledge with the WordPress community.

London Metropolitan University, main hall.

If you haven’t seen the schedule yet, you can find it here. Themes explored at this year’s edition of WordCamp London range from content to security, accessibility, the REST API, and of course current trends such as Gutenberg, GDPR and Blockchain, which have been given a dedicated Hot Topic category.

With just a few weeks to go, over the next few days we’ll be introducing our amazing speakers to the world. Say hello to the first group!

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Announcing the WordCamp London 2018 Schedule

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.

Tickets as sponsorship: Become a Studio or Patron sponsor at WordCamp London 2018

Alongside our sponsorship packages, this year we’re once again giving attendees the opportunity to support WordCamp London as a small sponsor. If you are interested, we have designed two options for you, and we’ve called them Studio and Patron tickets.

Studio tickets

A Studio ticket provides you with the opportunity to become a WordCamp London sponsor by purchasing a conference ticket as close to the actual cost of attending the event as possible.

Studio tickets give you full access to the conference on 14th & 15th of April. As well as knowing you’re helping us create a better event, you’ll get your brand exposed on the WordCamp London website, for an accessible price of £250.

Patron tickets

A Patron ticket gives you full access to the conference on 14th & 15th April, but is double the price of a standard conference ticket. It’s ideal for WordPress freelancers and small, new businesses to contribute to the WordPress community with a little bit extra.

If you have any questions, email us at london@wordcamp.org or reach out via Twitter (https://twitter.com/WordCampLondon), we’ll answer as soon as possible.

Get your microsponsor ticket today!

The Call for Speakers is closed. Now what?

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.

Call for Volunteers – WordCamp London 2018 #wcldn

Updated 19th March 2018. Thank you for your applications! The Call for Volunteers for WordCamp London 2018 has now closed. 

The success of every WordCamp London relies on the awesome team of volunteers who kindly take on the wide variety of roles and responsibilities required to make WordCamp London the best it can be.

WordCamp London 2018 needs you! 

WordCamps are created by passionate, eager and reliable people. If that sounds like you, then step up and let us know you’re interested in joining our backstage team.

If you’re considering becoming an organiser for future WordCamps, volunteering will give you hands-on experience with how the event is run. If you’re new to WordCamps, volunteering can be a great way to just get stuck in with the whole ethos of the WordPress community.

Check out some of the roles and responsibilities below so you get a better idea of how you could help make this event a success:

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Information About Invoices & Refunds for Attendees

Invoices for Tickets

In order to receive an invoice for any tickets you’ve purchased for the WordCamp London event, you must fill in the Google Form located here. Please make sure you’re only requesting invoices for tickets that you have already purchased. Once you have submitted the form, we will email you within a few days with the invoice attached.

Refunds for Tickets

You may ask for a refund for any tickets you have purchased but this must be done at least 30 days prior to the event date. This means all requests for ticket refunds must be made before 13th March 2018 in preparation for the event in April. Please send an email to london@wordcamp.org and we’ll be in touch to arrange a full refund.

If you have any further questions about your tickets, please get in touch by emailing us london@wordcamp.org and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

WordCamp London 2018 will have childcare facilities

Happy New Year, dear WordPressers! While our efforts to organise the best WordCamp we can are quickly ramping up, we thought we’d kick off 2018 with a big announcement: following 2016 and 2017, we’re delighted to announce that this will be the third year running we’ll have childcare facilities!

Who will be looking after my children?

We’re very pleased to be working with Nipperbout again to provide childcare services during WordCamp London 2018.

Nipperbout is the UK’s most trusted national provider of mobile childcare & children’s activity entertainment for 0-16 year-olds. They’ve been delivering conference and event childcare to exhibitions, conferences and festivals for 22 years and are the UK’s only national mobile childcare provider regularly inspected by Ofsted.

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Help us make WordCamp London 2018: Call for Speakers

Speaker applications for WordCamp London 2018 are now closed!

We’re looking for speakers to share their experiences with the WordPress community at one of the biggest WordCamp events in Europe. WordCamps are not-for-profit events aimed at content writers, developers, designers, businesses, and WordPress enthusiasts. They’re an excellent place to share and learn and we hope you can help us with that!

Our speakers are people who are willing to share their experience and knowledge with others. They help make WordCamp the place to learn and discover new ideas. Could you be one of our volunteer speakers in 2018?

We’re looking for speakers on a wide range of topics. In addition, here are some topics the WordPress community has said they would like to know more about:

  • GPDR legislation and Privacy
  • Gutenberg (page templates, building themes with Gutenberg, and so on)
  • managing a business and all that’s involved (finding and managing clients, advertising, and so on)
  • scaling websites
  • security
  • accessibility
  • developer-focused topics (coding best practices for theme and plugin development, API, writing secure code, and so on)

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Applying to speak at WordCamp London: The FAQ’s

As we’re really close to open our Call for Speakers, to encourage more applicants to WordCamp London, we have brainstormed some of the most popular questions about applying to speak and we’ve done our best to answer them here for you.

If there is anything you feel we have missed, or something you think is worth adding – please leave us a comment below.

Q: Are all types of talks welcome?

YES! The stage is set for a wonderful variety of speakers. We are open to the full spectrum of session formats and encourage you to submit anything from standard slide presentations to panels, demonstrations, and more.

Whatever your idea, we’d love to hear it.

Q: How long do sessions have to be?

We encourage a variety of session formats, which include, but are not limited to;

  • Long form talks: maximum of 40 mins, inclusive of Q&A
  • Lightning talks: maximum of 10 mins, with a group Q&A
  • Workshop: maximum of 40 mins
  • Panels: maximum of 40 mins, inclusive of Q&A

Don’t hesitate to get creative and submit a session format you think might be interesting!

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