We have just hit a new milestone. After opening the registrations back in May, today we finished all that we can do off site and tomorrow we are going to the Summer Camp location (Bol on island of Brač) to finish the preparations and welcome all attendees. Also, the registrations on the web site are closed too as we exceeded our expectations and there is too little time for some late guest to organize the trip.
Anyway, most of the preparations are done, there is still some nitpicking. But I don’t want to talk about the details here, those can be found on the summer camp site. I would like to talk about the challenges we faced while organizing this event.
Challenge number one
Well, that one is easy to guess. We are doing an event organization such as this for the first time :) We don’t have any experience in event management and we are just about to welcome 70 people from all across the Europe. Quite scary stuff :) But we wouldn’t been doing this if we thought that we can’t do it. We asked our friend Vladimir to help us as he has much more experience in organizing events. We also recognize the great need for such an event and that is why we strongly believe in the success.
Challenge number two
At one moment, while working on the camp program back in May, we decided to base the whole PHP track on the new upcoming eZ Publish 5 version. Big challenge because the whole eZ Publish 5 stack is a “moving target”. It is being heavily developed currently, the alpha version is just about to hit the streets. It is very difficult to plan the workshops at this moment and I praise all the speakers from the PHP track who will do it. Although the final release is due in 2 months I nevertheless think that it is very important to show to the community where the version 5 is heading. And the eZ Publish Summer Camp is an excellent opportunity to do so, to give to the community an early start.
Challenge number three
A personal one. I never held a long workshop, now I am doing a 3-day one :) Since I was not smart enough to delegate this to someone else, seems that there is no escape for me. Luckily, Nicolas Pastorino, Community Management Director at eZ Systems, will help me with this task. So I am confident we will have a great workshop.
To summarize: challenges exist to overcome them.
Yo-ho-ho!
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