IndieWebCamp East 2020: Save the Date and Call for Volunteers

Hello IndieWeb friends and family! 

Save the Date

After some back-and-forth, several of us have carved out some time over the weekend of November 14-15 to co-host IndieWebCamp East 2020. We hope you’ll be able to join us.

If you’re interested in a weekend full of IndieWeb related activities, sessions, learning, creating, and coming together in a warm and inviting community of people who care about and help craft the web, please save the date.

As its title indicates, the camp will be organized around Eastern Standard Time in the Americas from the early morning  to the late afternoon over Saturday and Sunday that weekend. Because we’re hosting the camp completely free and online, people of all ability levels and locales across the world are welcome to and encouraged to attend.

We hope folks will help us plan some surrounding social activities on Friday night before camp launches and the evenings of camp, but those details will be announced at a later date and time.

Details relating to (free) tickets and the ability to RSVP will be announced and available shortly. If you comment on this post or like/repost the syndicated copy on Twitter, we’ll be sure to notify you as details progress. You can also optionally sign up for the IndieWeb Newsletter to receive weekly updates that will include information about upcoming camps and events.

If you’ve never attended an IndieWebCamp before, we’ve written up some details about what you can expect at an IndieWebCamp to whet your appetite. You can also browse our archive of past camps with archived session notes, posts, and videos.

Call for Organizers/Volunteers

IndieWebCamps and related events are completely volunteer driven. This means we’ll need your help not only in seeing your bright, shining faces in attendance and actively participating on the days of camp, but in actually putting together and organizing the camp.

If you have some time to volunteer as a co-organizer or an area volunteer, please drop us a note in the comments below or in the IndieWeb Meta Chat Channel.

No prior experience or expertise is necessary. There are many of us around who have put together one or more parts of camp and related events before, and we’re here to help you learn if you need it. There’s also some helpful wiki pages with details. Helping to volunteer can be a great way to give back to the community. It can also be helpful if you’ve wanted to become more involved, but don’t know how. Perhaps if you’ve wanted to begin organizing other events like Homebrew Website Clubs, this could be a great stepping stone.

There are a variety of areas we could use help in as well as ideas for things we could be missing or might also be doing. A diversity and plurality of voices and ideas can help us continue improving our camp experiences. Below are a handful of areas we could use help/volunteers for:

Pre-camp

  • General organizing
  • Keynote ideas/invitations
  • Sponsor wrangling
  • Wiki gardening
  • Creating the primary camp landing page: https://2020.indieweb.org/east
  • Accessibility
  • Family friendly planning/programming (Kids track anyone?)
  • Outreach
  • Marketing
  • Surrounding social events / pre-party / etc.
  • Others?

During camp

  • Co-hosts for Zoom rooms to help on the tech side and oversee
  • Code of Conduct point of contact(s)
  • Note taking during camp and sessions
  • Wiki gardening
  • Welcoming newcomers
  • Ideas that may need help/work: Planning Notes and Brainstorming
  • Others?

Remember more hands make light work and the camaraderie and your ideas, inspiration, and effort can make everyone’s experience at camp even better and more fruitful. 

You can start volunteering today, by saving the date and inviting a few friends to join you.

See you soon!

I and everyone else in the IndieWeb community look forward to seeing you at Camp in November or at upcoming events before then!