A Forkable Conference
Introducing, ONE-SHOT by NodeConf.
Behold, a Node conference that anyone can run! ONE-SHOT is an effort by NodeConf to spread and grow Node events all over the world. Follow a few easy steps, ask us for help if you need it, and almost as easy as you can publish a module to npm you can be running a Node conference ☺
I’ve been running conferences for years and the most distressing comment I’ve often get is “how do you do it?”
It’s distressing because of the way people say it, they aren’t really asking in the way you ask how to do something so that you can go off and do it, the question is just a statement of bewilderment, it’s sort of like saying “how do you possibly do this impossible thing.”
The first event I ever ran was CouchCamp in 2010. I had a corporate card to run it on, didn’t have to worry about losing money or getting sponsors, and was free to focus on the content and logistics.
When I decided that I wanted to run an event for the Node community Chris Williams reached out and offered his help with all the things I didn’t know how to do (keep a balanced budget, getting sponsorship, working with a lot of speakers, etc).
Chris did this for a lot of people who then, in turn, did it for others. Eventually Chris started calling us all “The JSConf Family” and I’ve been proud of the work everyone has done over the last 4 years growing the field of community driven JavaScript conferences from a couple events in a few countries to dozens of events across the world.
Today our community is still growing as fast as ever but I’ve noticed that events aren’t growing quite as fast as they used to. I can’t help but think it corresponds with that perplexed statement masquerading as a question I continue to get: “how do you do it?”
I get better at running events every time I run one, and yet every new event I do is the hardest one I’ve ever run. What I gain in experience only gives me the confidence to take bigger risks and make each event more amazing. And I’m not the only one, nearly every organizer I know has followed a similar trajectory. For a while it even felt like a friendly competition, where we would steal each others best ideas and use them to go even more over the top, until Funconf and RealtimeConf set the bar impossibly high (Helicopters, Original Score, Aaron Paul).
Many conferences, usually run by big companies, basically do the same thing every year but the community conference scene has continued to iterate in a lot of amazing directions. Even new conference takes what they can from the conferences they’ve previously attended making their 1.0 event similar to someone else’s 3.o or 4.0.
I love going to these conferences, I love running them too, but if conference productions were this huge in 2010 I may have never started NodeConf, it would have been too intimidating. Since the beginning of this year I’ve tried to figure out ways I can enable more organizers. First directly, through new small events and mentorship with JSFest, and now with something that I hope people can pick up and run without my direct involvement at all.
In July I helped put together a new event, ONE-SHOT London, a simple single day speaker series which I hoped could be the prototype for many, many, more events run by new organizers all over the world. I was also incredibly impressed by the work Max Ogden did on NodeSchool, using a GitHub organization as a support structure for people organizing events. This lead me to create and document a clear process that anyone can follow and that we can all use to create a little community to support each other.
If you’ve read this far you probably give a shit about this kinda stuff. If you’re in to Node then you should start here, and enter the exciting world of community event organizing. It’s not nearly as hard as it looks, and we’re all here to help ☺
