Transparency Report 1: The Organiser Selection Process

In a series of posts, we lay bare our processes and list the tools that we use. For the sake of absolute transparency and so that other events may pick up a few, since we’ve already tried and tested them. We’ll be revealing the organiser selection, speaker selection and volunteer selection criteria and processes.

“How does one become a WordCamp Pune organiser?”, is also a form of “How do I become a WordCamp Organiser?”

1. We started with the three organisers of the local Meetup group called Pune WordPress Knowledge Exchange (Pune Wordex in short), Gagan, Umesh and I.
2. Over a couple of meetups, we saw members who were proactive and attended almost every meetup.
3. They even attended meetups that were of no personal or professional benefit to them.
4. We kept inviting members to the discourse at every meetup but there were only a few that started helping with ideas and planning the meetups.
5. They helped the other members out whenever or in whatever way they could.

Finally, we hosted an open meetup for people who were interested in becoming WordCamp Organisers. Guess who came and became organisers? The exact people we described above.

We didn’t look for people with skills required for organising a WordCamp or a conference. We didn’t look for people with a lot of contacts or extensive networking skills. We also didn’t look for people who have experience organising any such event before. We definitely didn’t look for people who wanted any fame. We had some problems because of that, but nothing too major.

We looked for people who were genuinely interested in having a throbbing vibrant community of WordPress enthusiasts and that worked out very well. We made up for our lack of skills by our determination and our lack of contacts by reaching out to everyone and till now we’re doing pretty well. Meet us.