WordCamp US 2024 – The SkyVerge Experience

Hi there! 👋 I’m Nik

I’ve been around SkyVerge since JUST before our acquisition, and these days I have my hand in just about everything as I help our team maintain success here at GoDaddy. For the past few months I’ve been leading the product direction for all of our WooCommerce extensions, and the SV brand in general, including helping to revitalize this very blog!

I’m also a Portland, Oregon local and full-time remote worker, so you can imagine my excitement when I learned that hundreds of my coworkers and contacts would be heading to my city for WordCamp US this year! In fact, my enthusiasm got out ahead of my critical reasoning and I quickly found myself applying to help organize the event despite it being my first ever in-person WordCamp 😅 

I was fortunate to join an expert group of organizers on the Volunteers team who encouraged all my very basic questions and carried a lot of the pre-event organizing efforts to ensure our volunteer crew was assembled and a schedule was in place. This allowed me to show up to the venue full of my “Welcome to Portland” unofficial-tour-guide energy, which is what I carried throughout the week, making as many dinner, drink, coffee, donut, and pizza recommendations as I possibly could.

The WordCamp Organizer Experience

In addition to playing local tour guide all week, I was also eager to show up and support the WP community at a flagship WordCamp like this. As someone who’s been around WP/Woo for a while but is still fairly new to the community, I know that my background at SkyVerge and GoDaddy gives me a somewhat privileged entrance into this space with both name recognition and a solid bank of good-will that has been built up by my predecessors, not to mention the leg up they’ve given me by helping me get into a position like this in the first place. All that to say, I saw organizing as a way to pay my dues forward and serve this community that had already given me so much, even if we’d never met.

As I mentioned, I was on the Volunteers team, and more specifically I was in charge of the room attendants who were helping facilitate the three session tracks. My organizing work on-site mostly consisted of walking entirely too many laps around the convention center (I averaged ~18k steps/day!) and making sure that our volunteers were in the right place at the right time and had all the supplies and information they needed to keep the speaker sessions running smoothly and safely. One specific concern this year was the capacity of the session rooms, which altogether totaled a bit less than our expected event attendance. This meant there was a real possibility of rooms getting overcrowded, so my volunteers had to keep a close headcount on attendees and be ready to shut the doors if a given room was approaching capacity. Thankfully (to my knowledge), we never hit one of these limits so we didn’t have to turn anyone away from the live sessions.

On top of all that, I also made myself available for any last-minute needs and was regularly running to re-stock various supplies (stickers, pins, even transit passes!), answering volunteer questions in our slack space, and even got pulled in on some set decorating when speakers needed additional tables, chairs, etc. for their sessions.

All in all, it felt great to be able to give back in such a tangible way. I loved getting to welcome volunteers to Portland and help orient them around the venue, and it was incredibly fulfilling to know that I was helping put on this event that was so meaningful to so many folks.

A WordCamp Welcome

And of course, it was a complete delight to connect with so many people I had previously only known as Slack avatars or, at best, sat in Zoom calls with. I did my share of networking, sitting in talks, and snagging booth swag when I had down time between my organizer duties. In the evenings, I made sure to attend as many side-events as I could to make the most of the short time we had to celebrate and build connections.

The thing that surprised me the most about this week though was the openness that I received from so many people who I didn’t know, or who didn’t know me before meeting at WordCamp. I was nervous coming into my first event knowing that so many of my fellow attendees, volunteers, and organizers had all been around the space for a decade or longer. But I got the strong sense from everyone I met that the only requirement for acceptance around here is showing up. My willingness to be present and engaged in the space was my ticket in the door, and folks were eager to hear how I got there, what I was up to, and what I thought of the event — or this or that development trend — based on that engagement alone. Again, I have to assume I carried a fair amount of privilege into these interactions, but I’ve heard similar sentiments from others before and I’ll certainly do all I can to extend that welcome to others going forward.

And One More Thing…

A lot has been said lately about Open Source, contribution, and what it means to be part of a community like this one. After a couple weeks of dragging myself through the mud and controversy that followed the infamous keynote address that ended our event, I desperately needed this post to be about anything other than that.

I will say that I think our discussion and growth as a community can benefit from not having clear-cut lines around these ideas and choosing to engage with them anyway, together. For me, contributing means paying your dues before extracting your own benefit. It means stepping down from the stage, platform, or shoulders that you stand on to welcome and listen to the folks working the hardest to make this all real, and rolling up your sleeves to actually do that work to the best of your own ability. And if the moment comes and the stage is yours, contributing means saying thank you to everyone who got you there.

So thank you Max & Beka Rice and Justin Stern for setting the bar so high with SkyVerge that I’ll always be chasing it.

Thanks to Ian Misner, Simon Porter, and Marcus Burnette for welcoming me, investing in me, and giving me room to grow while we worked together.

Thanks to Tamara Zuk for your utmost generosity and belief.

Thanks to my current SkyVerge team for holding down the fort while I was out “sipping mimosas” 😅 and for constantly pushing me to do less and be better.

Thank you to Machelle and David and Dustin for setting up our Volunteers team for success and encouraging me to jump all the way in.

Thank you Bryce, Justin, Lena, Matthew, Courtney, Alex, Adam, Sandy, Katie, Bob, Clancy, Eric, Brian, Ben, Ryan, Zach, Megan, and so many others who I met this week for seeing me, welcoming me, and joining me in making a wonderful event.

I don’t know if this counts as a stage – I don’t know how many of you will read this – but thank you for being the real, human contributors that made a difference to me.