It has been an awesome journey so far. I am telling you, organising a great, open-source conference is both awesome and terrifying.
This banner looks promising, don’t you agree? 2 days, 20+ speakers and around 500 attendees. This sounds awesome for sure, but how is it like behind the scenes? We do all of this open-heartedly, with incredible trust, communication and collaboration between us:
- We have found and contracted the perfect venue for a conference of this scale, Grand Hotel Italia in Cluj-Napoca; it includes the conference room, the coffee breaks and the lunch for the 2 days of the event.
- We have had an ongoing communication with both applicants and confirmed speakers,
- There are so many great JS communities out there! We found and got in contact with some of them. They replied with great enthusiasm and we’ve received great advice for the conference.
- We also have a few great partners that are helping us with promoting the event or keeping organised on the spot (we’ve discovered there are great people out there)
- We have amazing sponsors that have joined our mission. We have learnt that some companies do have a vision.
- We’ve build some new channels where we are communicating all our updates about the conference: our JSHeroes website (for all the conference info), our Medium (to mark the conference benchmarks and to keep our promise about being an open-source event) and social media channels (Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin);
- We’re orchestrating the social media updates as naturally as possible, so as to reflect our daily conference updates from “behind the scenes”. Every time you see a new post, you can imagine there was a collective effort to make that update a reality.
- We’re working with a designer, for all our visuals.
- We’re also working on a budget - see details in our Transparency Report,
- We have put together the schedule and launched the tickets here,
- And for that we made our legal paperwork: we are officially and NGO, called “Asociatia Clujsers”,
- We’re now looking to arrange flights and accommodation for our speakers,
- And as we have a budget, we’ve also found an accountant,
- And photographers, so that you have beautiful memories from the conference.
- There are volunteers coming in to give a helping hand, so if you want to get involved, let us know!
- We’re (obviously) promoting the event,
- Organising an after-event Transylvanian hike, for the speakers,
- Plus a pre-event MeetUp, with the speakers, for all of us.
- And for sure there’s other great work I forgot to mention…
All in all, we keep constant communication with all people involved in the above. It’s an adventure, and we love every minute of it!
Ok, so what’s next?
It has been a fun ride so far, but there is still more work to do. A couple of speakers spots are still unannounced, but we promise awesome people fill them in. The next big step is selling the tickets and promoting this event further.
JSHeroes would not have happened if not for the awesome Cluj Javascripters and for the great volunteers who made this dream come true.
Thank you all for this! #humansofjavascript
