From Polish-Only to Bilingual: Lessons from WordCamp Gdynia

I'm co-organizing WordCamp Gdynia - the first bilingual WordCamp in Poland. And while I'm very proud of what we already achieved, there are several surprises I didn't expect.

WordCamps in Gdynia were always my favorite. Mariusz, who has been organizing them for many years, always managed to make them amazing. So when he reached out to see if I'm interested in co-organizing, I agreed without any hesitation. Especially since the plan was to organize the first-ever bilingual WordCamp in Poland.

But why?

That's a good question. Poland already hosts multiple WordCamps annually, and there were a few English speakers. But for some reason, WordCamps in Poland were still done in Polish.

On the other hand, we had some problems:

• There were 3 WordCamps per year in Poland - sponsors were stretched thin

• There were only a few new speakers. There were some speakers present at almost every WordCamp (me included)

• Similar attendees weren't a good catch for the sponsors

Also, and this is the problem with many European countries, the Polish language is spoken only in Poland. So the pool of attendees is limited. Luckily, Poland is quite a big country that manages to have those 3 WordCamps with ~300 people each.

To solve this, we had to change something. That's how the idea for the bilingual WordCamp happened. It was the simplest way to make the pool bigger.

Theory

In theory, having a bilingual WordCamp gives you access to:

• An unlimited number of sponsors

• An unlimited number of speakers

• An unlimited number of attendees

What can go wrong, right? Gdynia is just a plane away. It would also enable those sponsors/speakers/attendees to learn about Poland and visit more in the future (yes, I'm a proud citizen who loves to show how beautiful Poland can be).

On paper, we should just relax, count the sponsorship money, look for the biggest venue, and think about how to review hundreds of talk submissions. Guess what? It didn't work out that well.

Problems

Very quickly, we started to stumble upon some problems.

Location was the first one. Gdynia is known to every Polish person. It's obvious that it's a part of the Tricity, so there are planes to Gdańsk, and it's easy to get to Gdynia. Very quickly, we understood our mistake - what was obvious to us wasn't easy for people from abroad. So very quickly in our communication, we started using the term WordCamp Gdynia (near Gdańsk). And this helped a lot.

Another problem was related to WordCamp websites. They are totally not ready for managing a multilingual version. We had to introduce so many horrible quick fixes to make it usable for people from both Poland and abroad. And still, some parts can't exist in two languages at once.

Getting new sponsors wasn't that easy, either. Gdynia (near Gdańsk) is terra nova for them. I get it. They don't want to risk it, especially since WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US were quite expensive.

Also, we had (and still have) problems with remembering that we are no longer a Polish-first WordCamp. Because the whole organizing team was Polish, we often thought Polish-first, rather than bilingual by default.

Biggest win

Despite all the problems, we managed to get many amazing sponsors (and we hope more will join). Also, we see attendees from other countries, which means it's working.

But the biggest win is connected with the amount and quality of talk proposals. While many WordCamps were struggling with this, we struggled with trying to figure out how to add a few extra slots. Altogether, there will be around 45 speakers in Gdynia.

Also, it was connected with the sad fact, we had to reject quite a big number of amazing speakers.

What we learned

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it is going. Despite some surprises, we managed to overcome most of them.

Maybe next time, we'll introduce non-Polish people to the organization team. It would be a big change, but why not? This would automatically remove the Polish-first thinking.

With sponsors, we definitely need to do more to invite them. WordCamp Gdynia is unique, but you have to get there to understand it.

It's the first bilingual edition, and we're still in the process of learning. We still need to wait for the conference itself to happen, so we can learn from the feedback from the attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

What I'm sure of is that keeping the bilingual format is a must. It opens us up for more opportunities, even if it requires extra work and changing our mindset a bit.

Join us

There are still tickets available for WordCamp Gdynia, and you can buy them on this website.