Are you looking for a great opportunity to get involved with the WordPress community?

We are in search of WordPress enthusiasts eager to lend a hand! WordCamps would not be possible without a strong volunteer base of people like you. If you’ve been thinking about attending WordCamp Birmingham and want to help out, we would love to have you join us! Volunteering at WordCamp is a fun way to meet members of the local and national WordPress community, as well as help contribute to making the event a success.

There are a variety of volunteer opportunities, each with different time commitments, experience requirements, and logistics. There are two requirements for ALL volunteers, regardless of the job or duration: be reliable and be friendly. 🙂

Look over the list to see if anything strikes a chord.  Then if you’d like to volunteer, fill out the volunteer form below to express your interest in volunteering.  Our Volunteer Wrangler will get back to you and let you know which options are available and work out a schedule.

As we fill up volunteer positions, we will remove the filled positions from the website.  So, if there is something special you’d like to help with, submit the form soon.

During the Event

Set Up/Clean Up: Help with event set up and clean up as needed.

Registration – Check in registered attendees and hand out nametags & t-shirts. Sell walk-up tickets, take money and make change, using an iPad/Square reader.  Being really awesome with alphabetical order helps here.

Room Emcee – Introduce speakers/sessions and keep things running on time. Keep an eye on the clock and give speakers a heads up when they are down to 10 and 5 minutes, and let them know when their time is up. Brevity and wit a must.

Photography – We need your your unique vision and your photography skills to document the event with your camera.   To give you an overview of what we expect from you as an official WordCamp Birmingham photographer, we have prepared this page.

Room Runners – Work with the emcees, video people, speakers, and everyone else working in the room to keep things running smoothly. Make sure there’s water for speakers, and provide support as needed for other event staff.

Happiness Bar – Answer questions and help WordPress users fix problems with their sites. Must be able to show level of expertise to be selected for this gig.

Food/Beverage – This is already taken of for the most part, but it would be helpful to have a few people keeping an eye on things. On Saturday and Sunday, we’ll especially need a couple of people to help around lunchtime.

Miscellaneous Prep – Random helping here and there that doesn’t have a category.

Remember that if you volunteer, or are sending an employee to volunteer, you must meet the WordCamp Central guidance for volunteers.

Thanks for your interest in speaking and helping us put on an amazing WordCamp Birmingham!

If you submit a proposal, here’s what you need to know:

• Speakers get a free ticket to WordCamp and an invitation to a VIP dinner prior to the event, but are not otherwise compensated.
• Sessions cannot be sales pitches for your product or services.
• Each session will be recorded and submitted to WordPress.tv, so you’ll need to sign an A/V release form.
• We will request presentation slides for review a few weeks before WordCamp. Make sure you can meet that deadline.
• WordCamp Birmingham has a Code of Conduct which applies to all participants at all WordCamp Birmingham events.

How Speakers will be Selected

The deadline for speaker submissions is May 15, 2018.

Once speaker applications close, the WordCamp Birmingham organizing team will review the submissions based on topic, assumed interest to attendees, and quality of application.

Update as of May 16, 2018:

On March 1, 2018, we began actively seeking a wide variety of topics and a diverse speaker pool. As of today, May 16, 2018, speaker submissions are closed.

Thank you to everyone who submitted a speaker submission.  We received 100 submissions from 59 speakers!   We hope to send out acceptance emails to speakers by this weekend.