It’s hard to believe, but WordCamp Finland 2016 is only 8 days from now. On Friday the 15th we have 12 excellent talks lined up for you (6 full length and 6 lightning talks), and we can’t wait to hear them ourselves! In this post I’ll go a little into the speaker selection process.
We were lucky to have 30 talk proposals from 24 different people. The overwhelming majority of those proposals were well thought out and we believe every one of them deserved to be heard. However, we knew we had room for only one track so choices had to be made. In addition to Finland, we got application from the USA, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Sweden. Because WordCamps are first and foremost for the local community, we had to set limits on the number of international talks.
So, how do you choose? We had a team of 4 people, made up of organisers, who read through your applications. 3 on the team had not been involved in the speaker application or selection process up to that point, which meant we could make an initial selection of talks anonymously, based purely on the proposed topic and description. Although I don’t believe it makes sense to completely disregard the person, this was a good way to ensure that to begin with, we had a varied and interesting selection of topics.
We aimed to have talks appealing to designers, site owners, intermediate and advanced developers alike. Some talk proposals were very similar to one another, and in those cases we chose the one we considered to appeal to the widest audience. In the end we quite naturally emerged with a talk schedule comprised of both experienced and first-time speakers, men and women, advanced and general interest topics. See the final schedule here: https://2016.finland.wordcamp.org/schedule/
If you applied to speak and didn’t get selected, do not despair! There are regular meetups in Helsinki, Tampere, Jyväskylä and Turku, all of which are looking for good talks and speakers. And of course, there’ll always be another WordCamp.
See you all on the 15th at Virgin Oil!
