Among many benefits of volunteering — aside from giving back to the community — is the feeling of satisfaction with your participation.
With every WordFest, being both a celebration of the community and the Festival of WordPress, we can attest that it is our volunteers who contribute to the success of the event.
Why does a virtual event need volunteers?
That’s a great question. Although the event is virtual and the need for support isn’t quite at the same level as it would be for a physical in-person event, there are still plenty of roles to fill.
Why volunteers and not paid team members?
Another great question. WordFest Live has no paid team members.
As it is being delivered by Big Orange Heart, a registered charity that relies on the generosity of people donating their time. Everyone working on the project is volunteering their time.
All funds raised through sponsorship and donations through the event are being dedicated to the further delivery of free well-being and mental health support for the remote working community.
We hope you choose to join us on March 4 as part of the WordFest Live team.
Volunteer Roles at WordFest Live
- Emcees – as an Emcee, you’ll be spending time on screen through the event, introducing sessions, running Q&A sessions and generally having fun with the team. You’ll need to be confident you can fill a void if we have the odd technical issue.
- Green Room Monitors – our speakers will be delivering their sessions in a variety of formats. Some may not have featured across a virtual event yet, so our Green Room is a space to connect with the team and ensure they’re all set and ready to go before they’re live.
- Chat Moderators – The public chat is a great way to communicate and interact between attendees, speakers, sponsors, organizers and other stakeholders of the event. However, this chat requires attention and moderation from unwanted and advertisement content. As attendees praise and thank the speaker for their delivery there are comments and feedback that can help motivate everyone. Additionally, the Live Q/A session is influenced by the questions that are submitted using the Live chat. Our Chat Moderators will be responsible to collect the questions including the noteworthy comments to be passed on to the A/V production team to be displayed on the Live broadcast so that the Emcees can recognize them and eventually be answered by the speakers. Great attention to detail is required for this role and you can also expect to learn a lot throughout this experience.
- Community Moderators – our mission is to enable freedom of movement within a virtual event – but we have to be prepared for all eventualities. So we need people who are happy to move about over the course of the event and ensure there are no violations of our Code of Conduct. You’ll also be a point of call should people want to report any issues.
- Communications – the Communications team sits in the middle of it all, ensuring that the right messages are hitting the right people. There will be a cross-over between marketing, sponsor liaison and technical support, ensuring we’re highlighting the right information, at the right time.
- Operations – as we shift online with events, behind the scenes, everything is running on a range of technologies that all need to be kept ticking over. So operations volunteers will help keep the event running and our servers ticking over. We are looking for:
- People comfortable who are comfortable with the command line, and have experience managing servers and systems.
- If things do go wrong, you will be helping to identify and fix issues, so being happy to dive into log files and troubleshoot.
- We use Nginx/PHP-FPM and MySQL for the site, and a basic understanding of this stack will be needed.
- We have more interesting technology for running the chat aspects; specifically, most of it is powered by Jitsi Meet, it’s not a requirement but if you have prior experience with Jitsi we really could do it with your help.
- A/V Producers – To ensure the visuals and sound as high quality as possible for the attendees, we need volunteers that will manage each live “show”. The role includes adding and removing Emcee and speakers, enabling any slides to appear and playing videos. This is a ‘behind-the-scenes’ role and as such will not require you to be on camera.
Experience with Streamyard, Restream, OBS or other live streaming services and simple video editing is a real bonus.
The A/V Producers will need to be confident in making quick decisions through a live event. We will be using a talkback system, for example, Discord to communicate, so you will need to be wearing headphones throughout and the preference is you are hard-wired, not wifi as connectivity is critical for continuity.
The event itself is a full 24-hour period but don’t worry; there are zero expectations that you’ll be across all of it.
In fact, we’ll be ensuring that this doesn’t happen for your own well-being.
The event will be divided into 6 continents: Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and North America. We’ll spend 4 hours in each region and we are asking for a minimum commitment of one region per volunteer.
Volunteers’ Benefits
The greatest thing you’ll walk away with is a massive sense of achievement in being part of WordFest Live in the making, but we won’t leave it at that. You’ll be featured in the official volunteers page, be given a lovely virtual ‘volunteer’ badge in your profile, to highlight your support.
Meet the Volunteer Support Team
Your volunteer team leaders are Topher DeRosia, Ahmed Chaion, and Michele Butcher-Jones.
We’ll be looking after you, as a volunteer to find answers to your questions as well as anything you’re unsure about, holding hands where helpful and ensuring that the volunteer team is happy so that WordFest Live is the success we know it will be.
As with so many events, it’s the volunteers that help make the magic happen. Join us to make this a very special celebration of all things WordPress.
Register to Volunteer
Please register your interest to volunteer at our 24-hour inclusive global festival.