As the feedback from this year’s WordCamp trickles in its already clear that the work the organizing team put into it was completely worth it. People loved the venue, the speakers, the food and they loved the city of Split. Seeing almost 200 people enjoying the networking opportunities and learning from their peers was a very rewarding experience for us. One recurring comment that stood out was that this was one of the most laid-back, easy-going conferences people attended – which is exactly in the spirit of Split. It’s awesome that the hosting city can imbue some of its ambiances in such a way.
There’s certainly plenty of takeaways on improving the next years WordCamp, whichever city the WordPress Croatia community decides to hold it in. This holds true for any event, but we’re extremely happy that none of these smaller issues seemed to stop anyone from having fun. Being a community event, WordCamp is a learning process for the organizers as much as for the attendees wanting to learn about the topics presented. This is why feedback was so important and we thank everyone that has taken their time to fill out the post-event survey we sent via email.
We had a pre-event to the actual WordCamp, a day full of workshops free and open to everyone. There were various topics covered, from WordPress basics to management of WordPress projects in a commercial environment. There was one that certainly stood out with a lot of positive feedback, Luca Sartoni’s “The Art of Public Speaking”. We always knew people in the community had the knowledge to share but dismissed the idea of publicly sharing it for the all the wrong reasons, so having Luca provide a good starting point proved to be a good idea.
More than half of the attendees in the survey reported that this was their first time at a WordCamp, which is awesome. It was our hope we could grow the community and get more people excited about WordPress by having this year WordCamp be hosted in Split. And this is exactly whats happening, people already stepped up and our community is going to see more speakers and more people involved.
We had great speakers this year, with interesting and well-prepared talks. We had a great time hanging out with you at the speakers dinner, the buffet format really works well and we’ll be doing that from now on. You know people are having a good time when they decide a night swim would be in order.
WordCamp Split swimming team 😁😳😀🖖🙌👍 thanks guys for being brave (and for going for a night swim) #wchr pic.twitter.com/sOKmSclumd
— Emanuel Blagonic (@eblagonic) September 2, 2016
Besides the streaming, where a total of 750 people had been watching the talks, we also recorded them. We’re preparing those for WordPress.tv and we’ll announce them when ready along with some links to their slides.
In what we hope it becomes a long tradition of giving out cheap plastic awards, we have the results for this year’s Best Speaker. We want to congratulate Nela Dunato, her talk “End Design Revision Hell” was the crowd favorite based on attendee feedback. We’re looking forward to her opening next year WordCamp.
Thanks to our sponsors and their generosity, this event had a not so modest offering of buffet dishes for lunch, finger food and coffee breaks, the afterparty and really topped up goodie bags. The budget for catering almost doubled compared to Rijeka last year, with almost 300 portions prepared, it all but disappeared in 40 minutes. One of the big takeaways for the future is that coffee absolutely needs to be available at every moment, much like critical server infrastructure. Even though the catering staff was continuously hawking the coffee supply, it seems we ran out a few times.
The afterparty was a blast, almost literally. Among the highlights is definitely Tomaž playing with fire. Apparently some had so much fun that they continued on to an after-afterparty into the small hours of the morning.
Once again, thanks to all of our Platinum sponsors: Convertiv, Jetpack and WooCommerce. Big thanks to ur educational partner Algebra, our Gold sponsors: GoDaddy, Neuralab, CaptainForm, AM2 and our Silver sponsors WPML and Sucuri.
Also, a thank you to our media partners, which did a great job covering the event: BUG, Netokracija and Transmeet.Tv.
A huge thanks to The Faculty of Economics Split for their great support with the venue and all of the staff.
And lastly but certainly not least, thanks to all the volunteers who gave their time in making this year WordCamp so great!
p.s. these photos are from our Facebook galleries, check the photos there and please credit the authors