Bucharest, Romania to Host a WordCamp October 8-9

photo credit: Bucharest – Smârdan Street – (license)

In 2008, while working for an Irish company under contract with the Irish Parliament, Bogdan Fireteanu was called into a meeting and told that he needed to build 50 blogs as soon as possible. That was the day he discovered WordPress. Over the next eight years, Fireteanu would become more deeply involved with the WordPress community as a partner in the VeloMedia Group and Crowd Favorite.

As part of a desire to give something back, Fireteanu decided to join the organizing team for his local WordPress meetup in Bucharest. After building a popular meetup group that averages more than 60 people per event, the team decided to take the plunge to host a WordCamp in Bucharest on October 8-9.

Although Romania has already hosted a handful of WordCamps in previous years, Fireteanu, who leads WordCamp Bucharest’s 15 organizers, said they are expecting this one to be the largest in terms of audience, speakers, and community involvement. Organizers estimate 250 attendees from their active community of 700+ WordPress supporters.

Fireteanu is a first-time WordCamp organizer but many others on his team have past experience in organizing corporate events. They selected the Romanian Chamber of Commerce, a modern venue in the city center, to host the event and are planning to put 14 speakers on the schedule.

“As for sponsors, once we announced the WordCamp, companies started to show their interest in sponsoring the event,” Fireteanu said. His experience easily gaining sponsorships seems to be quite common among the WordPress event organizers I’ve spoken with recently, as the software powers 26% of the internet’s websites.

The call for speakers is now open. Organizers are looking for presentations related to topics like remote work, managing WordPress projects, security, WooCommerce, Themeforest, and Saas for WordPress plugins. The deadline for speaker applications is August 31.

“The Romanian community is a very interesting mix of developers, young entrepreneurs, and people who want to learn more about WordPress,” Fireteanu said. “We have skilled developers with impressive stories whose work and presentations are always piquing everybody’s interest.”

Bucharest is one of the main transportation hubs in Eastern Europe and is well known for its rich cultural heritage and elegant architecture. If you’re looking to add a new event to your conference itinerary this year, WordCamp Bucharest will give you the opportunity to connect with a vibrant community in a beautiful city.

“As the community has been growing a lot in the past few years, everyone has been expecting this WordCamp to happen as an official recognition of it,” Fireteanu said. “We are all enthusiastic about it and we hope it will be the first one in a long line of WordCamps.”