All Things WordCamp Canada

Devin:
Hello Shanta, how are you today?

Shanta:
Hi, how are you?

Devin:
I’m good. I’m good.

Shanta:
Very good, thanks. Very good.

Devin:
It’s really nice that we got this opportunity because I know WordCamp Canada is happening. We’ve got news and questions and everything in the Make.WordPress Slack, but this is, I think, the first time we see each other.

Shanta:
Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Devin:
So how is everything? How’s the prep? Just let us know what’s happening now with you and your team as you prepare for what is probably the second-to-last month before July 11-13, right?

Shanta:
Right, right. Yeah, we’re down to the wire for sure. It certainly hasn’t been an easy run. I’ve been on organizing teams before. Most of my team, if not all of them, have been on an organizing team at some point. So we’re very experienced in this, thankfully. But I think since we last did one, there have been some changes. We’re also running a regional, not a local camp, so there’s a little bit more pressure on this one, but we get a little bit more exposure. One of the challenges we’ve had is getting team members to come in and stay with us. I think it doesn’t speak to the team itself because, believe me, I have the best team in the world. They’ve been absolutely amazing, absolutely supportive, and they know what they’re doing. This is the thing. But I think what we’ve had challenges with is, and I think it’s just the world today, people are too busy.

We thought it was a good year to do this, and it had been so long since any of the other camps had really gone on. We have had a couple of local camps in Canada since COVID, but we realized that if we all did our own local camps, especially in the same region, sponsors would be stressed because they would have to either pick and choose this one or that one, and none of us have the resources to hold our own camps just with team members alone. So we decided we were just going to pull everyone together and say, we are going to do this together, right? We’re going to pool our resources, pool our effort, and just go forward. We had discussions with some of the community team, with Matt, and he was looking forward to it as well. So I’m hoping that someone might make an appearance.

Devin:
Let’s see.

Shanta:
I’m not promising. I’m nowhere near it. I’m hoping, that’s all. But it has definitely been a difficult turn. My team is pulling this together very, very well, and we’ve almost got the minimum amount of sponsorship. We can always use more. Ticket sales have been a lot lower than we expected, and we had such high hopes for this. So I’m not talking in past tense, but I guess what I’m saying is that at this point, I would’ve expected a lot more enthusiasm from the community as a whole. We have such amazing people coming in to speak, such amazing sponsors, and I thought, yeah, this is going to be it. And we just haven’t had the same engagement that I was hoping for. That doesn’t mean it won’t come.

Devin:
Yep. Yep. Definitely. Well, let’s stop there and we’ll go back to that later. You mentioned team members. So I assume this is your core organizers, right? When you say team members, and if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time for the first WordCamp Canada, the first regional WordCamp in North America. So let’s step back a little bit and give us a little bit of context. Well, I can start with questions such as how many do you know as of now, how many WordPress meetup groups are in Canada, and then how many are active or inactive? And when you said something earlier about the community coming together, who are these community members you’re talking to? The meetup organizers in Canada, where are they from? As you mentioned earlier? So folks, we did have local WordCamps from Canada. I think we had one in Vancouver, but I’m not sure if Ontario had one in 2022 or 2023.

Shanta:
Ontario would be considered regional.

Devin:
All right. Okay. But we have Vancouver, I think that’s for sure. I remember.

Shanta:
That is correct. And Montreal had an online one.

Devin:
Let us know as well. Did you go to these two WordCamps, like online and offline? How did you talk to them during these camps? I guess we want to know the story behind how you can pull off the support across Canada and what was the hope that you initially had when you spoke with all of these folks from Canada?

Shanta:
So as far as the number of meetups, I don’t remember the exact number, but it is probably in the 15 to 20 range, but I don’t think it’s much higher than that. The highest concentration of them is in Ontario. So a lot of us in Ontario, because we’re so close together, we’re probably in the geographic area of the size of one state in the US.

Devin:
I see.

Shanta:
I’m in Hamilton. So Hamilton has had theirs. Toronto, which is about an hour away, had theirs, and then there was Ottawa, which is about another four hours away from that and would have theirs. Those are the three ones I would say. Then there’s Niagara as well, which is another half hour in the other direction. So we would all just attend each other’s WordCamps before COVID. We know that people have been burnt out and even trying to keep the meetups going during COVID itself was a big challenge. So in 2017, I’m going to take a step back for a second. I remember attending a WordCamp in Toronto, and at that time there were only about six camps going. There were plenty of meetup groups, but about six main WordCamps. I was attending the one in Toronto, if I remember correctly, and Halifax had their first one that year. One of the people I know was a speaker at Halifax, and she accepted to speak at Halifax, and then her hometown of Calgary announced that they were having theirs on the very same weekend.

Devin:
Right.

Shanta:
I said, we only have six camps in a year, give or take. We should not be having conflicts in our own country.

Devin:
Exactly.

Shanta:
Between May and October. That’s about the time that we have to put ours on. So I said, we need to start up our own Slack instance. We actually have WordPress Canada as a Slack team.

Devin:
Is it still active?

Shanta:
And I invited all of those communities in. So it’s been running since 2017. There’s also a Facebook group, which is a different setup, but we at least know some of the people there and so on. I usually say, “Hey, if you’re not successful here and you want to come over to Slack, please be my guest.” But I’m always, “Please use what resources you have there first.” The goal was so that all of these camps and meetups and WordPressers in Canada can talk to one another. That was the whole point of it. So when we started looking at WordCamp Canada, we were talking about it even over COVID. We said, if any time to do it, it’s now while we’re all remote so that we don’t have to worry about traveling halfway across the country or all of the way as the case might be. So that conversation started maybe four or five years ago. As things started opening up again, we decided that we were going to go for this, and we did invite all of those areas in. We even scheduled the meetings later in our day, Eastern time, to make sure that we could get the Western time zones. We’ve had members of the teams from Vancouver, from Calgary, and they’ve just gotten so busy that they aren’t able to continue. Same thing with Quebec, which is also a very big component of ours, especially with bilingualism. I thought we’d done a pretty good job in announcing it, inviting people. We post every week in that Slack channel. If there’s anybody who wants to join, you can just join us. We don’t close down the meetings or anything. Apparently, the message didn’t get through maybe as well as we thought it had as to when we had scheduled it, but we’d asked for organizers quite a bit anyway. We’ve got at least one of the organizers from Montreal who’s now helping us translate because unfortunately on a WordCamp website, you can’t do multi-language.

Devin:
Probably not yet.

Shanta:
You actually have to have an entirely different site. That’s a whole other ballgame. I know Twitter was a bit of a buzz this weekend about it. We’ve done our best to bring in areas of the country. Whether we’ve succeeded in that, I’m not entirely sure. I’ll be completely honest, most of the organizers are in the Ontario sort of band, but we welcome it if anyone else is still available. We are looking for organizers both from the East Coast, the West Coast, Quebec, and anywhere in between.

Devin:
Right. Well, that sounds like a huge challenge. I mean, what you faced during COVID and everything was probably faced by others, but I guess the fact that geographically Canada is so huge, and then you also have Quebec with bilinguals, that adds a lot of flavor in the way community organizing can happen. So that’s interesting. I know we only have two months to go, but you hear Shanta, they’re all still open for folks

from other cities across Canada, the meetup organizers who haven’t been involved. If you change your mind, you want to come on board, this is the time. So Shanta is still open and happy to get all the efforts from you. I see that regional WordCamps such as WordCamp Canada are seen as a vehicle for reactivating meetups in that country or in that region.

So I’m guessing you also had this in mind when you started everything. You have these hopes that WordCamp Canada will bring people together and ignite all these meetup organizers across Canada to also start organizing events. Again, local, regular, easy to organize, easy to attend. Is there any special approach that you add to the way you organize the WordCamp, be it in the form of a panel discussion, or are there any activities that you organize to promote this? Do you have any follow-up plans after WordCamp Canada? What are you hoping to achieve in reactivating the meetup groups in Canada? Is there anything you can share?

Shanta:
No, you’re absolutely right. That is one of the other reasons why we wanted to do a Canada one, almost as a way to start things off, because we know that some people have left the area or have shifted and things like that. Unfortunately, in Hamilton itself, for example, I lost my co-organizer during COVID, not because of COVID, but fortunately, and I didn’t find out about it for quite a while, so now I’m by myself. So the hope is to reignite and allow the areas that don’t necessarily have the critical mass to start their own community, to know that they’re not alone and give them a chance to connect with other WordPressers. For example, in Manitoba, which is the next province over from Ontario, we have a Winnipeg meetup group there, and they’ve done one WordCamp. To my knowledge, Saskatchewan has none that we are aware of and that we’ve reached out, and we’ve also used the community team to help reach out to all of the meetup groups across the country. Unfortunately, we haven’t had as much feedback from that as we’d like. Apparently, there’s some problems with notifications, so we’re not sure whether we’re getting the right people, so we may need to rethink that. But then there’s a couple in Calgary, and there’s at least one, sorry, some in Alberta and then some in British Columbia, and of course to the East. But so what if there are WordPressers in places like Saskatchewan? There are people in Manitoba, and we have nothing to the north of that. Yes, there are actually regions north of us even. We also put a big focus, and maybe we were a little ambitious, but we also wanted to include the Indigenous communities. A very large focus of this camp. Even though we are not necessarily Indigenous ourselves, we know that in Canada there has been a big, big push for Indigenous communities to become involved, to be recognized. So that was one of the big pushes behind this. Our logo itself has Indigenous roots in it, and one of the hopes was that on Contributor Day, when we were talking about multi-language and stuff like that, it wasn’t just going to be the French and the English because English for Canadians is different than English for the Americans, which is why we wanted to do this because a lot of people don’t realize there are a lot of differences, especially in the technology, things like shipping across borders. Anyway, but the goal was to actually include those Indigenous communities because if anything, something like WordPress is going to be an amazing vehicle for them to get their stories out. If WordPress is about democratizing the web, then what better way to help those Indigenous communities get their stories out? So our big push was not only to reinvigorate the existing communities, but to also help invigorate new communities and to also, especially not just WordPress communities and not just geographic ones, but those communities that are underrepresented, especially in Canada. The hope was that on Contributor Day, we could be one of the first camps to actually contribute to one of the Indigenous languages.

Devin:
Oh, wow.

Shanta:
Yeah. In order to do that, we need people who have knowledge in those Indigenous languages to attend.

Devin:
Sure.

Shanta:
So we do have some panels that are directed at Indigenous communities. We have panels that are directed to communities. So this is not necessarily going to be a camp where you’re going to find a how-to, that’s not to say that there won’t be those, there will be elements of a traditional camp, but the main focus on this was to make sure that we could invigorate the community, reengage the community, and help potentially start and reignite the communities that are out there, or just even start new ones and put us on the map literally.

Devin:
Yeah. Well, I hope that sounds like a huge, huge goal. I mean, out of the other goals that you also wish to achieve through this camp, but fingers crossed, I am totally with you when it comes to democratizing the web, giving folks the opportunity to be heard, to be recognized. I am totally also with you when it comes to bringing Indigenous languages into the tech world through WordPress. Have you been able to secure any speakers or main contributors representing the Indigenous folks in Canada, or do you still need more help?

Shanta:
So we’ve got our speaker lineup, and I know that we have more than enough people to actually fill those panels for which I’m ever so grateful. I know that we are working on securing our keynote speaker with hopefully some additional sponsorship from some funding that is coming through a third-party person. I’m not sure exactly if I’m allowed to release the details, but it’s still a negotiation at this point. But yeah, with any luck, we’ll have a keynote speaker as well from the Indigenous communities, and that will hopefully be able to set the tone for this camp.

Devin:
Well, I’m interested, I’m looking at the WordCamp Canada site at the moment, and you said something like your logo already includes this aspect of Indigenous. Can you elaborate more or pinpoint where I should go and see?

Shanta:
Okay, so what you see is the wapuu with a placeholder. That is one of the wapoos from Ottawa. They designed those a number of years ago, so they were kind enough to lend those to us.

Devin:
Oh, that’s sweet.

Shanta:
We are still finalizing the logo itself as we speak. So a lot of this was placeholder until we got it. One of the challenges we’ve had is we’ve had almost no designers join the team, and we’ve had very little social media join the team, and everybody’s been very busy. I know one of our team members has just finished teaching, so they’ve just been able to help a little bit more with social media and getting the word out and so on. So this may change very shortly in terms of what you’re seeing, but the general idea was, and I’m not as good at explaining this as some of the members of the team, the goal was to have canoes flowing down a river because one is supposed to represent the Indigenous communities, and the other is supposed to represent the more immigration and immigrants that have come to this country over centuries. The idea is that the two go down the river together. So even though there’s only one in the header there, that was just something that we threw together.

Devin:
Yeah. At the moment, I only see one.

Shanta:
The goal is to have the actual logo include two of them. We wanted the logo not necessarily to be a wapuu. It’s a placeholder for now. It works. We even have a page that shows all the previous wapoos. You might even find our Hamilton one at some point.

Devin:
What is that?

Shanta:
For those who can’t see it, it’s the ham. It’s what we call the ham. The GIF actually has lasers coming out of the visor that he has on.

Devin:
The eye.

Shanta:
Yeah. I think our friend James Tryon over at the wapoos has said that that is one of his top 10 favorites.

Devin:
Wow. I see that you have these Twitter and Facebook icons here. Not yet on Instagram?

Shanta:
No, I don’t think so. I think we had it set up, but we’re not necessarily managing it yet. Like I said, we’re still rolling that out. We had someone who was kind enough to set it all up, and then unfortunately, they had life happen, so they couldn’t continue working on it. We at least had it set up. We also had LinkedIn as well. We do have it on LinkedIn, so I’ll remember to remind them to actually look at that as well.

Devin:
I’m checking out one of the pages on the site, it’s called WP in your city. There’s a long list of meetup groups in Canada, and some of them have very interesting wapoos. Most of them are placeholders, but I see a very interesting wapuu with a cowboy hat. And then there’s one holding… oh, there’s one with a bigger tail. What do you call that animal?

Shanta:
It’s a beaver.

Devin:
It’s a beaver, right? Oh my God, that’s so cute.

Shanta:
The one for Ottawa is a beaver. That’s right.

Devin:
Right. So you all have to check out this page.

Shanta:
Yeah, so they did a couple of them. We’re borrowing Ottawa’s quite a bit. I just noticed that the Hamilton one isn’t on there, so I’ll make sure that we get that one up as well. There’s a bunch of these meetups from all over, and they

do all have social media on there, at least in some part, whether it’s just the meetup or more.

Devin:
This is nice as well, that you listed the last WordCamp that happened in this particular city or organized by this particular group. Excellent. When I first saw your site, it’s big and deep, and there’s a lot of hope. I’m wondering what happens on the day. Do you plan anything different than the usual WordCamp that happens in Canada so far? I wonder if there’s some sort of cultural aspect in the schedule. Is there anything like that?

Shanta:
Rumor has it that there’s going to be a game show, so there will be Canadian trivia involved. I can tell you that we’re going to be educating everyone on what Canada is or is not. Contrary to popular belief, we do not all live in igloos. When I was a kid, we used to get pen pals through this service, and this was back before the internet, of course. You’d write letters back and forth, and I had one in Brazil who actually asked me, so do you really live in igloos all day? No, of course not. But there are a lot of misconceptions about Canada. Yes, we do apologize a lot. Yes, we say “eh,” which is why the hashtag is WCEH.

Devin:
Where is the hashtag on this site?

Shanta:
Whenever we’re tweeting something out, that kind of thing. The hashtag we use, or the short form we use, is WCEH.

Devin:
I see.

Shanta:
It’s a Canadian thing. We always say “eh” at the end of some sentence or something. So we decided to play up on it, and I have to thank, I believe it is WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama, because they have WordCamp. So we sort of borrowed that and we decided instead they always say, “y’all, how you doing?” Well, then we decided to go “eh, how’s it going?” Same sort of idea. So that’s where the “eh” comes from, like “eh, how’s it going, eh?”

Devin:
I’m looking at one here, “contributor eh,” is that how you pronounce it?

Shanta:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, “contributor day.”

Devin:
Oh my God, this is so cute.

Shanta:
Yeah, I cannot take credit for that one. But even our sponsorships are Canadian-based. You have the maple syrup one, you have the butter tart one. It just goes on and on. So you are going to be, I don’t want to say you’re going to be sick of Canadians, but you are going to get a well-rounded education. Let’s just say if we could have used Coffee Crisp somewhere, we would have, but unfortunately, it’s copyrighted. But when I go to a WordCamp, even anywhere in the US now, I am known as the person who has Coffee Crisp. I went to one in Buffalo two weeks ago and somebody came up and said, “So you have them, right?” Meaning, do you have the Coffee Crisp?

Devin:
That is something to look forward to. Definitely. So if you’re around Canada or you’re… well, this is actually a call for all folks, Canadian WordPressers, or folks who probably don’t know WordPress yet, thinking of having a website, but not sure where to have it. This is also the opportunity, I guess. Talking about that, is there anything that you include in your planning to reach out to these new users, bringing new attendees? I mean, I know you’re hoping for veterans, all the communities to come back, but I guess COVID also brought us new users, and those folks that are probably not aware that our community has meetups, has WordCamps, and so slowly they’re catching up. Oh, there’s such a thing as WordPress meetup. Oh, there’s such a thing as WordCamp and other WordPress events. Is there anything that you plan for them? Because in our tickets, we also have those questions. Are you first-timers? Is this your first time attending WordPress events or WordCamp? So yeah, is there anything?

Shanta:
So we’ve done our best to at least get our word out through our own networks, through, like I said, mostly on things like social media. I think we can definitely do a better job of it, but as I say, that’s coming, we’re a little bit slow on it, but I think we’re going to do probably a better job of that. Sorry for the noise, but one of the things we’re going to be working on very shortly is putting together some more posts, more content for some of our attendees or some of our speakers to express why they are coming. We have people like Nathan Ingram, Marc Benzakein, Cory Miller coming, some really big names in the WordPress space, and they’re Americans. Okay, so let me be clear. We put as many Canadians in this as we possibly can, and we’ve done, I think, a pretty damn good job of things like diversity, visible minorities, Indigenous communities.
We’ve done, we’ve looked at this three times over. That’s not to say that we are perfect on this, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job, but we also wanted to get some of those heavy hitters in so that people could show, we can show people and say, look, we’re a big-time organization here, or we at least have that kind of pull if we can pull in people like this. So hopefully we’re going to have some more content related to why are we having Americans coming to the Canadian one because they support us, right? Ever since we’ve been talking about this, they’re like, so when is this happening? I’ve had a number of people, even Canadians, I don’t know where they’re hiding. They’re under a rock somewhere. So it’s not to say that it was strictly going to be a Canadian lineup, because I think it’s also important that we are also good to our neighbors to the south, as we say. We even reached out to some of the meetups that are very close to us, like Buffalo and Rochester, New York, so we call them our honorary Canadians. They come to ours, we go to theirs. It’s sort of a back and forth. A lot of this is about the relationships we have with other countries. I think there’s definitely a higher level of Canadians versus anywhere else in the world, and I’m pretty sure that we were on parity pretty well for representation in the gender space as well.

Devin:
Yeah. I’m looking at your speakers, your schedule at the moment. I see some very familiar names, but there are also names that I’m not aware of, so that’s a good sign. Probably I need to hang out more.

Shanta:
But that’s another thing too, is we wanted to make sure that we also did our best to balance out maybe some new speakers and shine the Canadian light on, it’s what we call Canadian content up here. There’s a phrase that we use when we even have American shows that are playing on the TV or whatever. They have to put in so many Canadian commercials on this, and the broadcasters have a certain amount that they have to play that is Canadian-related and so on. So we almost always joke about Canadian content, but this is exactly what it is, is making sure that we have the representation from our own country, but as well as inviting those in so that they can even share their experiences with Canadians or not. I think it shows the differences exactly to what we need to show.

Devin:
So I see that this is going to be a three-day event, with the first day being Contributor Day and then followed by two full days of conference. This is the same question that I asked to WordCamp Europe organizers whom I interviewed a couple of weeks ago. Out of these amazing lineups, interesting topics, and as you mentioned, there are veteran and new speakers and they both offer the same exciting talk. Do you have any favorites? I give you three because I don’t have anybody else to ask. If you want to share three topics or sessions that you are so looking forward to or something that you are so happy that they are there because it just makes a difference.

Shanta:
Well, I think one of the ones, and I know we haven’t published our panelists yet, but that’s another post that’s probably coming, but I can never get enough of the three I’ve already mentioned, so I won’t use them in this. But Michelle is one of our honorary Canadians, not just because she’s from Rochester, but she is always a very helpful member of the community and is always up for re-engaging and helping build those communities. So that’s definitely one I have to point out. At the same time, however, and this is where it’s going to be challenging, you’ve got working across borders. This to me is one of the key things that a lot of, let’s say the Americans or other places in the world don’t think about when they’re dealing with Canadians because Americans assume, well, there’s no problem with shipping, right? Well, of course there is because it’s coming across a border and there’s immigration customs and all that kind of stuff involved, but the same with the rest of the world. I think now, maybe I’m wrong, but a lot of people aren’t aware that you have to, if they ship something to the US or they ship something to Canada, they think it’s the same thing. We may have an unguarded border, but that doesn’t mean that we can just take stuff and walk across the border. So I think that’s going to be a really key one for me because that’s kind of why I based Canada, the WordCamp Canada on in my mind. So I think that’s going to be a really interesting one. Of course, as a sort of blanket

one, there’s the Indigenous communities and the accessibility ones because we have different accessibility laws. That’s a whole other ballgame, right? And there’s a bunch of those as well. Of course.

Devin:
Yeah, I see that.

Shanta:
And I think having sessions like sustaining WordPress into the next generation with Miriam Schwab from Elementor will be a big one because it’s going to be a lot about making sure that we have this not just around the world, but also in the Canadian space. Miriam, of course, has family here in Canada, so she’s also an honorary Canadian in our books.

Devin:
Well, you mentioned accessibility, and I see a lot, one of them is how to ensure your website complies with Canadian accessibility law. This is something that tends to get overlooked by probably the new beginner developers or designers, but I think this is very important. Yeah, that’s by Amber Hinds, right? And yeah, this WordPress empowering the underserved in rural Ontario. So there’s a lot of also the local, very Canadian-focused topics. I guess you are right, and you mentioned the whole parity, ensuring that everyone is equally represented. Good job team. This is really great. I know you mentioned earlier in the beginning there’s challenges with time availability and everything. So I’m wondering, I know this is not the end yet. You still have two months to work things out, to explore, to try different ways of reaching out to folks, push your outreach a bit more. But so far, what are the lessons learned that you can share, especially for WordPress event organizers in North America, if there’s anything?

Shanta:
Well, I mean, we’ve definitely tried a few things, and I think one that has been successful is the idea of having multiple levels for allowing people to sponsor. Usually, they just have the booths and maybe a name on the website and that’s it. We decided we were going to try a couple of different things like sponsoring the Wi-Fi, sponsoring one of the coffee meetups. Giving people an opportunity to get away from the booths and making some of them a lot more affordable, especially for some of the startups. So things like a plugin table, as we called it, or a shared table, which basically means you get a chair at a table with, say, 10 or 15 other companies where you can put your flyers out. Even if you’re not there, at least you’ve got a space to put your stuff, right. Because we know that there are a lot of cases where people just walk around the tables and drop their stuff around, which is not really the key. So to help curb that, we decided we were going to have a shared table, and you basically pay, I think it’s like a thousand dollars to have a chair at a table with some of your fellow organizers so that you’re almost sharing the cost of a booth. It also, in and of itself, builds community. Also, if you didn’t necessarily have the people to stay at the table all the time, or you didn’t have enough to put up a booth, you also can put an insert in our bags. We have that kind of ability. The idea is that you have all these different availability levels, and you can do almost anything at this camp. One thing I will say is that for a regional WordCamp, the rules are slightly different than for a local WordCamp in terms of the ticket prices. So I want to address that because a lot of people looked at the ticket prices and were like, “Oh, wait a minute. You guys are over the usual $40 a day type of ticket, right?” Well, first of all, you’re talking Canadian dollars, which is different than the American level dollars. So people don’t take that into account as well. But on top of that, this is a regional camp, so we’re trying to do for more people than you would for a local camp. We’re having it at an amazing venue, a conference center in Ottawa.

That was a big challenge for us, just to find a space that could accommodate the numbers we needed. So I will mention that at least. Some of the challenges have been putting together the team itself. We’ve had challenges with turnover and just people not having the ability to take on what they promised to do. Everyone has wonderful intentions, and I thank every one of them, and I don’t hold it against them, I really don’t. But at the same time, I think there has to be a certain level of commitment that has to be thrown in from the beginning. You’ve got to stick with this. I know life happens, but I think if I were to do this again, I’d look at getting more people and more commitment before starting, not just saying, “Hey, we’ve got enough to get this started.” Get enough people to keep it running through the whole thing and then say, “Okay, we now have this team, we vibe, we mesh together and we’re good.” So that is one thing I’d probably say to people is don’t just get the three people who can sign it and then start. Make sure that you have a good team and a good variety of people. Again, I’ve got some great people, but we’re lacking in things like social media, like design, and everyone else is a developer. So that’s a bit of a challenge. Make sure you have not just a diverse team in terms of who you have on your team, like the members themselves, but also their skillset. Wow. Yeah, that’s very helpful. We tried also, and we did do this in conjunction with permission, I guess you could say, with Central, that didn’t work, and we tried it as an experiment. We actually had a third track for sponsors. They weren’t necessarily going to be 45-minute long talks. First of all, they were going to be very clearly identified as a sponsor track. You were going to be sold to. They weren’t necessarily going to be recorded and put up on WordPress TV. We wanted to offer sponsors a chance to connect and present to a crowd and have it a captive audience.

So we decided to do four 15-minute segments over the two days. We thought this would be a big uptake. It was going to be part of our packages. You had 15 minutes, one in the morning, one in the afternoon on both days that you could address an attentive crowd, possibly some users, possibly some people who are interested in what you had. That did not work as well as we thought it would. We had very little interest in it. We thought that would be a big thing, and it just didn’t pan out. So instead of having, again, we called it a sponsor track, but really it was just going to be sort of smaller promotional schedules. We ended up opening a third track. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the sponsor money that we hoped to get from that, but at the same time, we’ve now just gained the opportunity to have some more wonderful speakers.

Devin:
It’s going to be busy and probably, I would say, a little bit challenging as an attendee. So many interesting tracks, so many interesting people and talks just make it harder.

Shanta:
That’s right.

Devin:
I wish I could clone myself. I could split into two, three people. All right, while listening to you, I’m clicking around and I see there’s this “Bring Your Team Together” page. Do you want to talk quickly about that? So probably company

Shanta:
This was another idea that we were hoping would take off, and I don’t know whether I’d say it was a success or not, and that doesn’t say that it may not still happen. What we wanted to do is, especially in a place like Canada where everything is so spread out, we have almost two provinces in the middle between WordPress communities. You have some on the West Coast, some on the East Coast, somewhere in the middle. If you’re all coming to WordCamp Canada, why not use that as an opportunity to meet with your team? If you’re a remote team and you want to get together and do your work retreat, then you have that opportunity. We had at least one company who said, “Yes, we want to do this because one of our team members is in a country that requires a visa and they’ve been turned down to the US. So going to Canada to do this actually works in our favor.” The goal was that a lot of the hotels around, as well as the venue itself, we could make available. Obviously, there’s a cost involved, but we were going to at least piggyback it onto what we had already, and you could basically come and meet with your team, say the day before or however you wanted to do it. We were going to use our buying power towards helping you meet with your team if you needed to.

Devin:
That’s such an interesting concept, and I hope you can pull it off. If this works, it could help other WordCamps to experiment probably on a smaller scale or even for the flagship events. I don’t think I’ve heard such a thing happen anywhere else, but this has been… I see that you are actually trying a lot of different things, including in the tickets, you actually offer the full amount for 50 tickets, the actual cost.

Shanta:
Yes. And actually, that’s probably a little bit low. Those are our micro sponsors. By the way, it’s cheaper than WordCamp US, just putting it out there, and we actually, I think, sold more than what they did last year at the US of the micro sponsors. So thank you to all of them and the sponsors that we do have into this because it just shows that there is an interest in this, and we thank them all and the attendees for that matter, those to come as well.

Devin:
Hopefully, more folks will buy tickets after listening to our talk. This has been an amazing, interesting, and

fun talk with Shanta. So to end our talk today, I’m looking at the WCEH playlist. What’s happening here? I’ve never seen anything like this before on a WordCamp site, and I see songs submitted by you, and there’s also by a volunteer named Julia. Who are they? Like Canadian singers, right? I mean, I see Bryan Adams.

Shanta:
I read a book by Mike Myers recently called “Canada,” and he swears that the biggest thing that Canadians do is rave about the fact that something is Canadian. That’s what we do.

Devin:
Interesting.

Shanta:
So I think this is where it sort of came from. Yes, we have our own playlist and you can submit whether you’re attending or not, but hopefully, you will.

Devin:
Smart. I like it. I like the way that the team makes it very Canadian, the culture, the spirit, the hopes, and everything else. I know it’s not easy. You can only do so much to really facilitate all the hopes and expectations the community has. But again, Shanta, it’s been a pleasure for me to… oh, do you have anything to say?

Shanta:
Just one last thing. I want to thank my team once again because they have been the most amazing people on the planet. Sean Hooper, Matt Graham, Rick Radko, Paul Byrne, Jamie Oastler, Kiera Howe. They have just been absolutely amazing and have undertaken things that are well out of their comfort zone. They’ve been absolutely supportive of this. So I want to thank each and every single one of them. Like I said, we were looking at the size of our team versus the US team, and we’re like, look at how much we’ve done. We can always use more organizers, by the way, but I wanted to at least personally thank each and every single one of them. They’ve just been amazing.

Devin:
Oh, that’s so sweet. You all get to see me talk, interact with these folks that Shanta just mentioned at WordCamp Canada. Check out the tickets page. There are still more tickets that you can grab, and there are all these exciting plans. I can’t wait to see the logo though. So let’s see.

Shanta:
As soon as it’s up, you’ll know.

Devin:
All right. Well, again, Shanta, it has been a great night. It’s 10:00 PM in Jakarta, but it’s been a great time chatting with you, listening to the stories, your journey. I hope in the next almost two months, you get all your wishes come true. Get more sponsors, get more tickets, get more help, and also the local organizers, local folks in Canada coming up and getting involved. All the best for WordCamp Canada. Thank you so much for bringing all these good things to one event, and looking forward to the recap or the photos or anything after the event. Thank you so much, Shanta, and I hope to catch up with you again next time.

Shanta:
Absolutely. Take care.