IndieWebCamp Bellingham Day 1

I think our first day of IndieWebCamp Bellingham went pretty well. I have been to several of the Portland IndieWebCamps, but this was my first time helping to organize one. I always get nervous before events I've planned, no matter how detailed my preparations and lists are. It almost always goes just fine, though, and that was the case today. I forgot a knife for the bagels and cream cheese, but we managed with wooden coffee stir sticks (hashtag #indieknifeclub).

There were seven of us in attendance and a couple were quite new to the indieweb, so we had a lot of good discussions about the basics, including a lot of "Why" and "How" topics. Since it was a small group, we didn't have multiple sessions going at the same time. I thought that was a nice change of pace. Nothing wrong with multi-sessions; just different.

While it's fresh in my mind, a couple notes for other organizers based on today:

• The official event pages (like https://2017.indieweb.org/bellingham) should include clearer ways to reach the organizers and to the discuss page. An attendee had a difficult time reaching Salt and me, even through Facebook. Ultimately she created a Twitter account and reached us that way.
• For introductions and sessions, make sure at least one person has volunteered to take notes in the etherpad. We missed getting notes during the introductions because Salt's computer was being used for streaming while mine was being used for demos. We forgot to ask someone else to take notes.