JavaScript CraftCamp 2023 - #JSCC23

Last update on 2024-02-08

It's done! The JavaScript CraftCamp 2023 is over. I'm happy I got the chance to help organizing the event.

First of all, thanks to all the participants, making this event so great!

We had some struggles to organize everything and there is always a time where you think "this is not going to work", especially when little sponsors are showing up in the beginning. A couple of things were organized "on the fly", like having enough BBQ grills. And some stuff just worked out by chance shortly before the event - like having Friday's breakfast sponsored.

What went well

When organizing such an event, I'm focused more on the things that did not work out so well. It's great that we received a lot of positive feedback from the participants. People mentioned they'll join again next time and the community discord was very active and attracted quite a few new members - even after the event!

Things we can improve

We have written down a couple of improvement opportunities in the JSCraftCamp repository. If you have comments or feedback, I'd be happy to read them in the comments of the linked issue!

  • PR is a hurdle, takes time and is "difficult"
  • explain/show pacman rule to make groups of people more welcoming
  • split session presentation and room finding, to speed it up
  • propose people to have others present their session, if wanted
  • prepare a location-orga-cheatsheet, when does what happen and who takes care, prepared upfront
  • in multiple sessions: 2 or 3 people spoke ~80% of time without looking if others wanted to talk. making it hard to include those people → some people talk louder (mention this issue at the start of the day) and maybe session hosts can moderate if necessary

Registration process

The general feedback for the PR was usually that it's too time consuming and difficult. I have helped everyone who wanted to register and I even went into video chats with people to do it with them. There were probably others who didn't take the time or had the motivation to register due to this fact. Another problem with this registration is the openness of it. Some people just don't want to tell everybody what events they attend and we should make sure they can feel welcome as well.

I have to admit that I kind of like the PR approach as it weeds out people who are not willing to invest time into this event. We have a very low no-show rate at the event and I believe this is due to the fact that people had to commit something to be able to attend (pun only slightly intended). I'm okay with trying out a different registration process next time though: Helping people to register and unregister was quite a big time investment for myself.

I'd be happy to hear ideas from the community about this!

Community building

For myself, I think being more engaged in the Discord and organize remote events after the event itself would be nice. I imagine some of the new Discord members can feel lost, since there were weren't a lot of community events since the JSCraftCamp. We collected some ideas but we did not have someone to execute them. In the coming months, I hope I can invest more time into this.

What's next?

It's 2024 now, we recently started conducting our weekly orga calls again. Let's meet on 7th-8th June 2024 at the Munich Kraftwerk (Maiborn-Wolff)!