#FBW is best designed in a collaborative environment. Depending on your goals as a team, like sponsor sales, ticket sales and/or how many sessions and/or parties you plan to have, will determine how many and what roles you will want to fill. Having a team of peers brings more depth to the event; together you will design sessions that may not come to the surface when working in a vacuum.
The list below is not fully comprehensive, and there may be some of these roles that do not yet apply to your event. Look for the skills you will need and work from there.
The city organizer in Asheville, John Hornsby, created a slide deck to help his recrutment process. We’ve created a template to help get you started in the Material Bank.
Logistics
This is where the rubber hits the road, everyone on this team will be making the design come to life. Finding venues, setting up in each venue as needed, coordinating and meals or snacks, facilitating technology as needed and more.
Marketing
Your marketing team would be best facilitated by having at least two people, one person dedicated to making local connections to spread the word and another to build a local social media strategy.
Programming
Your program development really needs at least five people if you are planning to do a call for speakers and have to select who will make the cut. You need a 3 person speaker/session selection committee that no knows who is in this group.
If you are going to hand-select your session leaders then you can get away with two to three people. This group will be designing the flow of your event, the experience and communication with session leaders.
Finance
Find someone that is good at building financial projections for the entire team to work towards and guide your decisions.
Your financial person should also be able to maintain a simple accounting system (you may even want to set up a free www.waveapps.com) to track income and expenses.