Building in public: Website, Mastodon and Event Catalogues

How.Camp is a free, open, collaborative event for free software and open-source. It will happen on the 27th of July in Gabrovo – a small mountain town in Bulgaria famous for the humor and the bird place of the fantastic artist Christo (yes, you have heard of it).

I decided to share some of our activities, inspire others to follow our steps, and organize their FOSS event.

Website

We build the website. It's a static HTML template we purchased at Themeforest. We did it in the two languages of the conference – Bulgarian and English.

Since we didn't have much information, we added everything we knew and filled the empty spaces with an FAQ. Usually, no one reads it.

Mastodon

We created a Mastodon account to share news and contact the community. It's @howcamp@fosstodon.org, and we currently have **19 **followers.

Submit to event catalogs.

We know the date and the location, so we added the event to the event listings:

Then, just after a few days, your event will be present on their website, and thanks to their authority, it will be easily discovered by search engines.

Search for speakers

We started reaching out to people we know from the past or we liked by watching their presentations at events like FOSSDEM or OpenFest.

At the moment, we have one confirmed speaker. His name is Luca Weiss, and he is an Android Developer at FairPhone.

Venue

Since we aim to organize the event via the Internet, we approached a few venues over e-mail. We received offers from 3 out of 3 we asked. We must pick one soon, based on our budget and other factors we will share next week.

Registrations

The event is free, but we would like to encourage people to pre-register so we can know how big of a room to book. Currently, we aim for 80 people present, and we have 75 seats left!

Till next week, friend!