CascadiaJS is a community run conference by web developers for web developers. It has been run by volunteers since its inception in 2012, but has never made it clear how people can participate and contribute to the experience. This document, influenced heavily by the open source software community, hopes to document explicitly how someone can contribute to CascadiaJS. Please read this document in its entirety if you're thinking about getting involved. If you have any questions or concerns about this document, please file an issue and we will respond promptly.
- The good, the bad and the ugly
- Roles and ownership
- Join the conversation
- Reporting bugs
- Be willing to add to your toolbelt
- Share your experiences
- Be a good citizen
- Appendix
Contributing to CascadiaJS (or any community conference) can be a truly rewarding experience. It is an opportunity to create a shared experience that brings hundreds of people together to share knowledge, get to know one another and have a great time. You will play a part in giving brilliant people who have never spoken before a platform to express their ideas to the world. Products, platforms and companies will spin out of the conversations over Whiskey.js that you help facilitate.
But it's not all roses. In fact, it's often hard, dull, detailed-oriented work that starts 6-9 months prior to the conference. The tip of the iceberg that you can see (the conference) barely hints at the total amount of person-hours that go in to making it happen. Take an honest assessment of the spare time you have.
And finally, the very people you are working so hard for (the attendees) are often unappreciative of your hard work and sometimes downright mean. The people who get the most out of contributing to CascadiaJS are the kind of people for whom service to the community is its own reward.
If you'd like to contribute to CJS15, below is a list of roles that we could use some help with:
This year's CascadiaJS is going to be different from year's past, we are going to curate 3 days of content. Shared infrastructure that spans all 3 of these events will be taken care of: event space, ticketing, catering, Wi-Fi, etc. The responsibilities for the curator for individual days will be to build a small team that can handle everything else and really breath life into each day. It is a high stress, high reward role because at the end of the day you are responsible for the entire event.
Own the web content cradle to grave, including updates as tickets go on sale, speakers are announced, etc. You are responsible for the design of the site, shipping timely updates and fixing bugs.
Manage the Call for Speakers and work aggressively to solicit submissions from a HIGHLY diverse group of people, where diversity includes but is not limited to: gender, race, geography, occupation and experience. Your responsibilities include: sourcing great submissions, building a committee to review submissions / select talks and taking care of the speakers during the conference.
Manage the coordination of vendors and volunteers leading up to and during the conference.
Spread the word far and wide about the conference.
Wrangle sponsors.
There are several channels that the CascadiaJS community congregates, please feel free to join any/all of them and spend some time listening and getting to know people. To be honest, things are kind of quiet in between conferences. If you have any ideas on how to keep the conversation going, please let us know!
- Gitter
- Twitter - @CascadiaJS or #CJS15
- IRC - #cascadiajs on irc.freenode.net
Everything has bugs, including conferences. If you see something that you think should be fixed, please don't hesitate to file an issue or submit a PR.
A major factor that often keeps developers from participating in community events is a lack of comfort with the tools and workflows that are typically employed. Depending on your background, these may be things that you have experience with or they may be intimidating obstacles that send you running for the hills. Try to keep an open mind and remember that it's ok to ask questions.
Many would-be organizers or contributors never even figure out how to get started because Google fails to provide much insight on how community events actually work. This document is an "ok" first step, but ultimately we are ALL responsible for documenting the things we've learned and posting them online where they can be indexed and curated into collections of useful information.
Finally, before you dive into contributing to CascadiaJS please read our Code of Conduct.
Below are just some of the resources that we used to build this document. If there are other resources that you think are missing, please send us a PR and we would love to add them.