Thoughts on IndieWebCamp West

Over the weekend, I co-organized IndieWebCamp West 2020. This was a replacement for a physical event that I have attended for the last few years in Portland, Oregon. I attended many in-person IndieWebCamps last year, and it is looking like we won’t be having such things for the foreseeable future.

We’ve tried online IndieWebCamps before, but I felt we missed some opportunities in the past. So, we tried some new things. The whole event was conducted using Zoom.

• A Cook Your Own Dinner pre-party where we shared a meal together and socialized.
• A room serving as a ‘Hallway Track’ for off-topic chatting
• Two rooms with 4 each.

The sessions were a good mix of conversation types. And even afterward, I found myself sitting up each night after the event just chatting with people. It was the first time I feel we captured more of the in-person Indieweb feeling by adding in those social opportunities.

Hoping for an East Coast timezone event later this year, and some popup sessions in between, to keep things alive. If not for the current state of the world, we might have had one IndieWebCamp a month in 2020. We’d already had one in February, an Online one, and one in March that was converted into a remote event last minute.