I wrote this post before the wecode was held and I’m publishing it almost a month after the conference. I apologize for the delay, I definitely had too many things this past month (or just a few but I was really tired).

And this week I listened to a podcast about “belief change blindness”… that fits perfectly with the topic of the post. Basically is another way our brain tricks us into believing something we never believed on.

Let’s see it with an example: Spielberg announces Ready Player One and I think the film is going to be awesome. After some time I read posts, reviews and go to see the film and I realize it’s a mediocre film (hope not!). My brain “thinks” that it was an average movie from the start and doesn’t remember the time it thought it was going to be great. It changes the narrative because it doesn’t take inconsistencies or failures too well.

So this is a list of the things I thought, before the conference, were going to suck. I wrote them earlier to check?/assure? my beliefs. Let’s see them.

Things are going to go wrong

Although we organized a big event last year, the lechazoconf, it was a completely different beast (:P) than this one. 200 attendees, 2 days of workshops, open space and lots of invited speakers… lots of things that can go wrong.

Specifically, these are the things that I’m expecting (2 days before the event) that would go wrong:

• WiFi. It’s going to crash and burn with so many attendees and all the workshops.
• Workshops are a bad idea in a conference. Noone will be able to follow them and won’t be popular in the open space either… because you have to prepare them in advance.
• Quality. We’re going to suffer from some bad talks and discussions.
• Food is going to be Ok. Just Ok, nothing fancy but slightly better than average.
• Details. We haven’t worked evenly in the conference (except @juanignaciosl). I’m sure we have missed a lot of small details.

I just hope we didn’t mess up anything major.

Let’s review them…

• WiFi: it worked flawlessly. My main fear was completely unfounded. I’m really happy about this one :)
• Workshops: I think they worked pretty well, people were able to follow them (in part thanks to the great WiFi) and people even propose them in the Open Space. Another fear that didn’t happen.
• Quality: I think it was above average, with some talks that were really, really good. I think the format, all technical was a very good decision.
• Food: eh, more above average than I thought at the beginning but it wasn’t amazing (as the lechazoconf last year).
• Details: we missed a few and I’ll write about them (mixing coffee with open space, recyclable water, vegan food separated, lanyards…) but way less than I expected.

There were other things that went worse than I expected (I’ll talk about Antonio post later) and some things that went way, way better than I thought (the party comes to mind, it was ridiculously cheap!).

But in the end, my main fears weren’t so. Let’s hope it continues this way! :)

I’ll write later some other posts with the budget (come on, Renfe, send us the invoices!), feedback and real problems of the conference.