We’ve just finished our second London’s Calling Community conference. We’ve been asked a few times why the name London’s Calling and why didn’t we opt to go with the Dreamin’ name like the majority of the other conferences.
There is a simple answer to that, we’re not dreamin’. If you’ve been to England, you’ll know it’s cold, damp and cloudy, especially in February. This means that our conference has a bit of an edge.. You can thank the Vitamin D deficiency for that.
One of the things we try to do with this event is to infuse it with British culture. Being in the interesting position of being an American living in London, I understand my own as well as theirs. Where Americans would embrace the concept of Dreamin’.. The Brits might give you the side eye. A little too optimistic for their taste. So as part of our objective for London’s Calling, the event has to be reflective of the intersectionality of Salesforce and British culture. One would say it’s no easy feat, but we make sure there are elements of both in everything that we do. We give you Ohana served up with a side of sarcasm.
Let’s start with the name, London’s Calling was the name that was tossed out whilst we were sitting and drinking gobs of champagne and my arm was being twisted into joining Francis & Simon on this adventure. It was to be a placeholder name until we found something more clever. Guess what folks, THAT never happened. We decided to stick with the name and got a theme song in the mix! The next thing we did was tshirts. If you’ve seen the design of our tshirts, you’ll see they cross whimsy and steampunk. We know other community events are doing tshirts, so we’re not the first to do this, we just hope ours show our personalities.
The next part that we hope people notice is that we try not to take ourselves too seriously. Yes, we want this to be a great event that people will come back to year after year but we know we’re not event planners and are doing this in addition to our day jobs, night jobs, school and a host of other things happening in our lives. We’re not polished and we’re hoping that adds to our charm. What we do take VERY seriously is our content. We spent hours pouring over 150+ submissions for only a handful of sessions. This meant that only 22% of submissions were accepted, which is good and bad and it’s hard to turn away fabulous content, but we have many user groups in London. Definitely present your content there if you were not selected.
Other things we don’t do are confetti, dancing and karaoke*. I think this may be a holdover from the fact that the UK hasn’t won Eurovision since 1998. Some are still sore about this and it’s better to just leave it alone.
At the end of the day what we want people to take away from our event is that we’re a ragtag but enthusiastic group of people that want to put on an event for the community that they’ll enjoy and want to keep attending year after year or until we run out of ideas. We want it to reflect the culture here which we know is a bit different from event to event. We’re hoping when you attend ours, you’ll see what we’re about.
Now that we’ve finished our second one, we’re hoping the vision is a little more clear.
*This is a constantly evolving list of things we don’t do but may do in the future.. Depends on our mood that year and how much its rained.
Force of Anarchy 