Events

This is our second in series of how WordCamp Boston managed to be produced, and deals with what’s become an overwhelming and often crippling issue for us: space.

Boston proper has a number of lovely aspects to it (particularly in January!) that fascinate people who travel here. A truly fantastic public transit system, amazing restaurants, a particularly high concentration of superior academic institutions and let’s not forget: the ocean. What it has in charm, it lacks in… er… space. WordCamps are a very specific thing, with no real umbrella organization, and thus, securing a large space like a convention center presents a bevy of problems.

Very early on, John Eckman as chair was wise enough to secure the Microsoft NERD Center. To its credit, MS has really made this space available to the community and if you’ve attended a tweetup, meetup, conference or tech related event recently, you probably have a NERD badge or two still stuck to your clothes. Really, the only limitation to NERD is capacity, which tops out at about 250 in their largest space.

When we originally met to talk #wcbos, this was a bit disappointing, but we decided it was a precursor to next year, when we’d look at spaces like the Stata Center. We wanted to sell out, and make the event memorable. We were over the moon with how gracious Leah Brunson, our contact at NERD was. She’s been accessible to us all the time for all our wacky requests and has never once flinched (even if everyone else on the team did) when I would say, “So- craaazy idea, but what if we…..”).

But with over 2 months before WordCamp, we were sold out. And I mean, OUT. Angry emails, phone calls, threats to the family dog. We had to make a decision: were we going to move, or just be happy we were in such demand? Within an hour, we were on the phone with Stata Center, and trying to work out a deal in which we’d be able to move and double our capacity. Stata, btw, is a fabulous new building for MIT, but is a campus building and we’d need to be sponsored by an MIT department. In addition, we’d lose Microsoft’s sponsorship, and would meanwhile incur a slew of new costs. We’d also lose some of the truly neat aspects of the NERD Center, like auto recording of sessions.

Microsoft, showing its savvy at things like this, noticed the twit-chatter of available space issues, and went to work on her own. By the time Leah called, she had secured new spaces in NERD never available for conferences before, and new technology they’d never used before to make our event accessible to 400 attendees. Relieved and thrilled, we opened up registration again to accommodate an additional 200 registrants.

As you saw in yesterday’s post, we also have an unbelievable number of sponsors, who then had to respond on their own to our expanded registration by enlarging their swag offerings, or simply by upping the supply of what they were providing us. In a few cases, the small, local vendors we’d chosen simply weren’t able to meet the demand, so we needed to find new ones.

On Jan. 23rd, you’ll see an insane amount of resources, volunteers and attendees converge on NERD Center for what we truly believe is going to be a WordCamp that will blow you away. Please, be sure to consistently thank NERD and Microsoft staff, because it is only through their dedication and assistance that we are able to make WordCamp happen for as many people as we have.

We’ve heard the jokes about securing the Garden for next year, so it’s worth noting that we are, indeed, already planning for space next year. Despite that, don’t wait next year either, get your tickets early.