 Hello everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Camilo Bravo. I come from Ecuador and I'm here to tell you about the time I organized the Drupal camp. So let's start. So the first motivation for me was I actually wanted to practice speaking and you know talks such as this one and and Back home there are not many camps or you know events of this kind So of course the next logical step is to create one Which seemed like a good idea at the time But as you'll see it involves more than you might initially think about Anyway, it happened and this is it This is kind of the image of and name of the event. This is 2017 in October and I will tell you about a bunch of the aspects that organizing this involved From me From the perspective of a first-time, you know organizer of any kind of such thing So, let's let me just preface this By quoting a quote that I'm sure many of you are familiar with I won't repeat it because last time I gave this talk You know the computer crashed right after this slide. So let's just keep it so here's Kind of the subjects that we're gonna cover. It's a lot. Don't worry about Reading all of this for now We're gonna go somewhat chronologically Starting in May, this is five months or so before the actual event and So the next the first step for me was you know before Coming up with even the theme for the event the name or you know Program or anything like that The first step was getting a team together So the team is what you know without a team you don't have anything you cannot do this by yourself So a team for an event like this Which was more ambitious than not needed to have more than a few people and The way we organize this and I'm sure Many teams that do things like this do the same way is We have a core team of three or less people Or ideally three There are the people that Care enough for the event to make it happen no matter what and then extend the team That is the people that will by be assigned roles But don't really have to know about every aspect of of the thing That way, you know we have a the core team is is a You know really motivated to make this happen And this structure worked well for us We actually put it to the test when one of the core team members left Shortly before the event and was replaced by another from the extended team So, yeah, it works Another idea to keep in mind is as with everything around soft words good to have a backup Ideally for each member of the extended team that handles one specific thing You would have more than just one person Realistically, this doesn't always happen, but you know, it's always good to have a goal in mind Next question is when to do this exactly For us the question was between September and October and there were a bunch of considerations Locally we had well, I think maybe the biggest one was the Qualification rounds for the World Cup football, which I didn't know much about so I had to do some research and Yes, you don't want your event near the dates of you know the games Other triple events that might conflict with yours Even though in hindsight, maybe it would have been a good idea to do it at the same time as triple con Vienna But, you know, it's something to keep in mind also Universities have their schedule midterms and whatnot So you don't want to do it at the same time that students have to you know study and Of course things like local holidays that kind of thing so once you set a date then you can start thinking about a Schedule and for that you do what composer does you create a dependency graph and That will give you kind of Organically a schedule We created a sort of Gantt chart for you know timeline of things that need to happen and in which order and There are some things here that are obvious, you know You can't publish a program if you don't have a website that kind of thing so just At this stage just prepare and anticipate for things give yourself enough time enough resources people and such to Actually do what you're planning to do or you know cut down on on scope the Next step is venue without a venue you don't have anything For us this was a university But it took a while to get approved. This is kind of a timeline with Specific events the left column the red column is the number of days until the event so you can see to More than a third of the time to get the venue approved which was stressful to save it is We were denied officially before that But we really really wanted to get that place so we Went back and back again until they said yes So sometimes you have to do that Once the venue secured We wanted to start working on design first step is creating a logo We took some time with this. We wanted to get it right. We had a couple of rounds With someone from the extended team who handled designing general So with the logo you don't have to have a website to start sending like for example a Google form for measuring interest in the in the event or Taking control of the Facebook page for the community and just putting the logo there and letting people know that hey Something's gonna happen But of course you do need more design work and designers tell me this is called a style tile Which will give you guidelines typography scholars and whatnot for how everything will look And from this it explodes into a million different things that You'll need to do probably Well, we probably did More than we needed to but you know you have fun doing these things By the way at the end if you have a question you can grab some of the stuff that that is left That is here on the table taking a step back We've covered a couple of the topics We're doing good time wise I think And it's June Four or so months until the event Let's talk about the website So of course being a Drupal event we wanted to do this in Drupal 8 We got a platform that sh to give us hosting for free since this is a community website Which was awesome? It worked really well And the other thing we used for the website is something called pattern lab this led us split the work between front-end and back-end and You just have to agree on a JSON format for the data and you can build Widgets or blocks or entire pages in this way So it's something that we were able to adapt to Drupal 8 And it's useful This is What the website looks like? There were some stages in the development of the site We defined these in detail when we started This was important because you don't want to be working on something that you don't need yet You do need certain other things like for example, you don't even have speakers for a program So you don't need to build a calendar functionality yet That kind of thing so it's good to plan ahead of it We decided to make this an organization level website Drupal Ecuador Partly because we wanted to To do a couple of fancier things than if it was just a website for the event Arguably superfluous superfluous functionality like Attendance could upload photos into the site and you had a gallery that kind of thing so structurally the the event is a content type in Drupal and we had the group module where sessions or groups and Attendance are members of that group And that way, I think we will be able to use the website in the future But I will stop there with the website To say this I Shouldn't Spend all day talking about this even though this is actually my area of expertise And if you're doing an event like this, you shouldn't spend all your time working on the website Even though it's tempting There are a million other things that need to happen and You can always improve the website and you can always Find excuses to be working on that So as a back-end developer myself, I need to get To restrain myself a bit and work on things like promotion That's a big thing that was very new to me There were a couple of camps in keto before and I was lucky to to be working with some of the people that that organized those So we collected all of the media photos videos Design contacts everything that they had and use that as a starting point You know if you create everything from scratch Then it's it's much much harder You need to do a lot of email and it's useful to use You know the tools that we have For example MailChimp will help you do this help you with the templates and everything so you don't spend Hours and hours designing emails, which is not a great use of your time There is some work on social media that you need to do a lot of its manual Contacting groups because contacting people in other communities I'm trying to you know Promote your event trying to get people to come and to speak All of that is very manual it helps if you actually talk to them face-to-face or at least on the phone Even though you know for us It's kind of a weird thing But It's it's you know, it's how it works we did Some paid promotion manual Facebook this helped it was not too expensive in a quarter to do this and You know you get a fair amount of clicks for your page and whatever We use Twitter also we had an account with some some account you know followers and We were able to to get a couple of tweets from the Drupal Association from the official Drupal account that helps a lot and Of course, don't forget to submit your event to Drupal Call to any other Drupal sites that You know collect and display these events Also, don't forget about traditional media Newspapers are happy to have something to put on their text sections So that's always helpful too. Let's evaluate We're halfway through And it's July Let's talk about sponsors So the previous event had an overly complicated in my opinion A structure of sponsorships for this one we decided to just have two tiers Both were relatively cheap and simple rules and I think this worked well We created an actual dead tree document that we Showed companies This is also useful Because you know companies need to see things on paper so Don't underestimate that And this is kind of a timeline of each sponsor that we got again on the left It's the number of days until the event happened So you can imagine how stressful this is Our first sponsor technically which was the venue Was 97 days before the event the next one came almost one month after that and With that we decided the event was possible and we're just going to do that Month after that we got the second gold sponsor to provide actual money and We were confident Of course a week before the event one of the sponsors changed from gold to silver Which is not great, but it wasn't the end of the world and Takes us to budget So as you can see the event was fairly cheap and This is roughly how much money went in from gold silver sponsorships and our pockets and How it was spent? There was a lot of printing food We had t-shirts and we had a workshop. Let's put a pin on that and a tiny Piece of social media So let's talk about losses Not a lot not the end of the world again, but not exactly ideal either As for what we spend the money on You can see this chart didn't include venue, of course, which is a sponsor It didn't include recording of the sessions, which we did as another sponsorship It doesn't include design Which I would have loved to To pay actually because it was a lot of work Also logistics and organizers Those people didn't get anything Not ideal again if you want to make your event sustainable as for what money comes in You might have noticed that there is no ticket sales section of this pie chart that's because they went the event was free and Couple of reasons why? first one, it's well It's free. So that's always a good thing It's you don't need to explain that We wanted to give a boost to the local community, which I think we did But On the downside And I've heard this a couple of times in in this Drupal con Is when you make something free You can't expect everyone to show up in our case 185 people registered and only 83 showed up. So not great The other downside big one is all of your money depends on sponsorships, which Again, not great We're almost there and it's September one month until the event Let's talk about speakers Rough timeline of things we did let's go through each one The first one Sure, you're familiar with We had a form on the website basically a ad group page And we had a couple of types of sessions that we wanted to cover The first one is talk, of course. The second one is remote talk. We did one of these The hangouts Which was really fun it worked But also you need to spend some time setting it up testing and making sure everything works Wi-Fi what not We had discussion groups Something like birds of feather We wanted to have a panel In the end we couldn't make that happen We had one keynote and we had workshops basically training sessions and That was it The second thing we did for speakers is as I'm sure you know or have noticed We are not known for our presentation skills So we organized a Workshop half-day workshop This was done by a local NGO in keto run by my wife and They do human rights and a lot of training so for them it was easy to to do a workshop on effective presentations You know everything from how to set up your PowerPoint to General speaking skills We did this three weeks before the event We didn't make this mandatory of course But it helped us as organizers to you know get a sense of the people and I think it helped the speakers to you know Become a part of the of the group and you know knowing each other before the event. I think it's very helpful The third thing I selection and this involves spreadsheets We're not gonna zoom in on that It's actually kind of boring, but I will explain a bit how the process worked And I should have said this at the beginning all of this is my our personal experience You know it depends on Your culture even or your level of Comfort with these things so I Will just explain What we did here? We had 38 session proposals and the three people on the core team We wanted to select the sessions We decided to Each one feel one of four buckets with each lesson either strong or a weak yes or no and In the end this this worked very well We coincided in most of the sessions and only had to discuss a couple What I did personally I had a system of Points where I would add or subtract a point based on a certain criteria Like if it's a special type of session for example panels would get a point If there was more than one speaker on the session, which was rare For the speakers themselves if they were foreign or they had good experience that kind of thing and For the session itself if you had clear objectives if the topic was relevant we had a I remember one of the Proposals what was something about? PHP nuke something something that I haven't seen in ages So that kind of thing is not really relevant We only have a few more topics to cover It's October And I think this is somewhat relevant Let's talk about logistics So we had in the end after selection we had 19 talks three workshops two discussion groups a Remote talk and a keynote. That's 26 sections in three days in up to four rooms which Changed each day because that's just what the university could give us We had a big keynote room and We had the main university hall where we set up our registration table and sponsor booths So that's that's a lot to cover And to organize we had volunteers we had you know all the speakers For each of the speakers, you know, you need to make sure everything works for them That they know where to go For the recording team that everyone showed up and did it you know a good job at Recording and managing their equipment and all that The food you need to look at special meal requirements You need to check each room make sure it's ready before each session You need to set up the registration table have people there welcome attendants You need to manage the volunteers Give them tasks Manage where someone doesn't show up You need to keep track of your cables and adapters and whatnot Wi-Fi is always a problem We had a group photo This by the way is designed to look horrible And it is and the main takeaway here is You shouldn't be doing this yourself You should get someone to help you with this Even if it's a small event It's it frees you up to actually attend the sessions and talk to the people which is the whole point of doing something like this So we called that the head of logistics and that was Again my wife She helped a lot and Yeah, this is the group photo Not everyone is here because it was three days, but Everything turned out fine last two topics. Let's put them together Recording and social media again best if done by someone else so you don't have to you know Be tweeting about the companies that sponsor you and you know keeping up with everything during the event so Yeah, luckily we did have one of the sponsors just take care of that and the event happened so What happens later? Well Actually a bunch of things immediately after the event. We had another sponsor. They gave us Was a restaurant they gave us room Somewhere to wind down after the event, you know make those precious social connections We also needed to update the website the Facebook page You know remove everything to sign up for the event because it already happened After a few days we needed to send emails we needed to We had on each session sheet of paper for attendance to write their names So we had to enter that data into the website We had to send the feedback forms to the attendance. That's how we set it up I Bloating session recordings Did not happen after a few days, but you know it happened eventually More updates on the website Social media All of that the main idea is you need to prepare for all of these before the event even starts And just make yourself at least this is trailer word with just a plain list of checkboxes Because after the event you Won't have much capacity to think about these things So a couple of other random lessons We did try to prepare as much as we could But no matter how much you do it's always going to be crazy during the event. So just embrace that it's not that bad if Or I should say when I do this again, I will look for stronger support from companies and universities not just sponsorships, you know cash, but You know, maybe get creative with it and get other kinds of help. Maybe companies can bring their people and You know, there's there's a million things that you can do That I wish had done The other thing is We had a couple of sessions with really low attendance And that's because we had too many rooms at the same time and not enough people to fill them all so that that's not great and That was the event in keto now what if we had So I wish I had all of these things when I start started doing the Drupal camp I wish I had resources That I could look up for things that I wasn't familiar with I wish there was a Community of you know organizers which there is but Now it is actually official as I'm sure you heard this morning it's called the event organizers working group and You have a URL here through all that org slash community slash event dash organizers and You can get involved in this you can join the meetings You can join the slack. This is by the way a separate slack from the main Drupal one I'm sure everything's linked from here There's a newsletter and there's an issue queue as with every thing in Drupal so As an organizer or as an aspiring organizer you can benefit by attending these calls and getting involved in this group We were just set up so we'll start working on getting resources ready and And you know you can reach out to us and we can share our Hard earned knowledge of how things work That's all. Thank you. Any questions? Yes Ask Great, yes, please use slack while it's still free So if anyone has a question And if it's a great question you can grab some of the Some of the stuff that we printed that we never Distributed so there's a small notebook and a t-shirt That might fit you Yes You mentioned that the the main team was three Are there specific rules for these three? We just wanted to have Okay, so obviously more than one person right in charge of the event because that Screams burnout, right? and two people Well, maybe you won't Agree on everything so it helps to have a third person to You know have a vote about certain things. I think three is a good number just because of that But mainly it's just as few people as possible that that really care about the event So that that's I Heard someone talking about yeah this organizing the I Forget which Drupal camp and they also said yeah, we have three people and you know, of course you have more Dedicated to other things, but I think three is a good number to you know If anything happens with anything they are all aware they've been to every you know Meeting and everything and they they will be able to solve any problem I think it's really important to to have that from the start Yes Because from outside So this I think it's a good question is So is it worth it to to call people from the outside to speak at your event? And I think this depends a lot of Your location and your history, you know your local communities and everything In in Ecuador we It was kind of obvious to that we needed to do this in in Spanish, right? so Obviously that restricts a bit of the of the speakers that that you can bring We also wanted to to give local speakers, you know a chance to to do the thing and That's another reason that we didn't do much of that Also, if you bring someone from even a neighboring country you should really pay for you know Transportation and that kind of thing and we didn't have the money to do that So we decided not to do that that said we had this remote talk with someone that that speaks Spanish and that is relatively well known and And and it's great because it does give you, you know Kind of credibility to have someone that you know this is really good and known in the Drupal community and all that But I think it depends. I mean you have to evaluate and decide, you know, what you want to do, obviously But yeah for us it it was also it was just a bit too much we already did I think more than we Needed to than we should have So yeah, that is an extra thing that would have been stressful Yes Yes Not yet So I have two answers for that Question is what where I do differently that I did another one I Would do things differently. This was my first one, right? I wouldn't try to do as much. I wouldn't print t-shirts. I wouldn't You know have so many rooms. I would restrict the schedule more And also I would have charged at least, you know five dollars for for a ticket It seemed like a good idea at the time It was just the decision that we took but you know, it's really hard to manage Everything else when you don't really know how many people would be there But yes, it will happen eventually we'll do another one, but You know the bar is set so it doesn't really make sense to do a lot less Next time I don't think it's a good idea there. So yeah, I think As I said, I would reach out to companies and universities sooner We have a lot more to show now, of course We made a point of recording a session and taking a bunch of pictures and all that so we have a lot of material So it's definitely going to be easier next time But yeah, if you're doing the first one just just don't do all this It's it's a lot Yes Thank you, thank you very much. All right, so as always please feedback it's important and Thank you