Blog fellyph cintra - wp image 971986922jpg

WordCamp Europe: first-day recap

I finished my first experience as a volunteer in an IT event outside Brazil. Now I can say – It was amazing. WordCamp Europe was a huge event with more than 1500 people from different nationalities. A crazy thing about Europe here is that it is easy to find different nationalities anywhere.

Imagine a huge event like that. Many different cultures in a short distance. If we compare it to Brazil which is a continental country, it is hard to bump into people from other countries. But sometimes language is not a real problem. Most of them speak English. It is possible to speak, Polish, German, Dutch, Finnish… And learn more about their cultures and communities.

It is time for WordCamp Europe 2016

On Friday at 7:30AM some volunteers were waiting for the doors open. Some of them knew each other because two days before happened some warm-up events. When they opened the doors to us, we got the last instructions to start to work in the event: where the stages were, what our tasks were, etc.

At 8:30 AM the doors were opened for WordCamp Europe attendants. The same problem with registration happened in any WordCamp around the world, a huge group arrived at the same time, and we needed to make things go quickly. But always before the first lecture, the groups were inside the event. This moment reminded me of WordCamp São Paulo.

9:30 AM I started to work: as a door guard. What do I need to do? Things like: Pass instructions about the Stage, information about the schedule, showing the directions to other stages, and closing the door when the place is full. Easy? A little.

It was good because I started to speak a lot and It was a great opportunity to practice my English for two hours; the plan was to stay there only one hour, but the time passed by and I didn’t notice. When I finished, I got another task: to organize the vegetarian line for lunch. And my last task was inside the Swag station.

The lectures

Matias talking about calypso at Wordcamp Europe
Matias Ventura presenting Calypso at WordCamp Europe 2016

After my shift, I could watch one lecture about Calypso the new react WordPress API. Matias presented this lecture about the future of the WordPress ecosystem. Matias is a person super important in the WordPress community, and I had the chance to meet him at my first WordCamp São Paulo.

The second presentation that I saw on the first day at WordCamp Europe was with Erica. She talked about the duties and challenges of being a “Happiness Engineer”, and how this role is so important to WordPress users and the community in general. Erica is also present in the Brazilian WordPress community. She is from the US but has lived in Brazil for a few years.

Talk about happiness engineer at Wordcamp Europe
Erica Velarse presenting at WordCamp Europe 2016

The first day was a little hard. When I arrived there, I was tired because I had gone on another trip before and started working in sequence. On the first day, I needed to know many things about the event, new words, and new friends. But I love WordCamps, and this made things easier.

I was a WordCamp organizer and volunteer in Brazil for a long time, and the feeling is the same in other countries; the first minutes when the people started to arrive, at the same time I started to think about all the things we need to do the best event, I started to feel the adrenaline to make things work.

More posts about Events in Europe:


Publicado

em

,

por

Comentários

Deixe um comentário

O seu endereço de e-mail não será publicado. Campos obrigatórios são marcados com *