It was so hard to keep it a secret until it was announced during WordCamp Europe 2024’s closing remarks, today 15 June 2024!

Announcement

Announcement video

See the official announcement video on the YouTube channel, the video that has been shown in Torino at the WordCamp Europe closing remarks on 15 June 2024.

(Clicking below will open the video on YouTube in a new window/tab)

You can also see it as a video on X from the audience point of view, with the crowd cheering, filmed by Bernhard Kau.

My short speech

After the announcement video, I was invited on stage as the new Local team lead, it starts at 08:47:20 into the livestream. We offered Läckerlis to attendees, the delicacy speciality from Basel, given by Basel Tourism/Convention Bureau!

(Clicking below will open the video on YouTube in a new window/tab)

Application website

Welcome to Basel

We are thrilled to welcome you to Switzerland in June 2025! Discover Basel, a human-scaled city located at the crossroads of Switzerland, France and Germany in the idyllic triborder region – between the Swiss Jura, German Black Forest and the French Alsace.

Basel was chosen by the Swiss application team for WordCamp Europe for its triborder area with France and Germany, for its multilingual and multicultural character and because it is a very pleasant city with many cultural sites and museums, the Rhine river and easily accessible hiking trails. The Art Basel fair will be held 10 days after WordCamp Europe.

If you have the capacity to stay a few weeks longer, you can visit the beauties of Switzerland, take an hour’s drive to the Europa-Park theme park in neighbouring Germany, or to romantic city of Colmar the ‘Little Venice’ in France. You can even attend the Montreux Jazz Festival in early July.

Congress Center

The Congress Center, part of Messe Basel, is extraordinary and will make your experience the best you can dream of. Check their website and virtual visit tool!

This is Basel

The official presentation of the city by Basel Tourism.

(Clicking below will open the video on Basel official YouTube channel in a new window/tab)

Some backstory

In 2022, during WordCamp Europe in Porto, we (a group of Swiss contributors) started talking about proposing a Swiss city to host WordCamp Europe 2025! Some people doubted that we would be chosen because Switzerland has the reputation of being an expensive country! We then discovered that the inflation that was hitting other surrounding countries hard wasn’t as high in Switzerland, which made prices more level. We thought it was our chance to do it now or never.

We later learned that the city would be negotiating discounts on hotel nights and offering a free transportation pass to anyone staying in an hotel or renting alternative accommodation (AirBnb, Booking, etc). It won’t cost you as much as you think! Basel is called “The Heart of Europe” and is very easy to get to from many European cities, which means lower travel costs than Porto or Athens.

During the spring of 2023, before WordCamp Europe in Athens, I got in touch with one of that year’s Local team lead (Takis Bouyouris), as well as the Porto 2022 Local team lead (José Freitas) and asked a few questions about the amount of work involved in the local team, the tasks to be carried out, and so on. After the announcement for 2024, I also talked with Laura Sacco, Local team lead in Torino. Their answers seemed perfectly feasible for us, experienced (local) WordCamp organisers.

Over the next few months, I assembled a team of very enthusiastic people, some seasoned WordPress contributors, some Meetup group/local WordCamp co-organisers around the country, another previous WordCamp Europe (2019) co-organiser, some “locals among locals” in Basel itself (who started the Basel Meetup group). Full application team list (besides me): Michelle Bulloch, Philipp Zeder, Claudio Rimann, Pascal Birchler, Nick Weisser, Silvan Hagen, Gina Bialas, Philippe Krebs. Since our acceptance, more “local” people are interested in taking part next year such as Matthias Kurz.

One of the most important aspects is the vitality of the local community in each candidate country! We’ve been working hard for nearly two years to revive the dormant Meetup groups and make our country very active! We are the country with the highest number of Meetup groups per capita (1 per 600,000) and we organise events every month in almost all the groups! Some groups were inactive due to the departure of the main co-organiser, but we’ve discovered that there were lots of enthusiastic people ready to take them over!

We have had one local WordCamp every year since 2014 (apart from 2020 and 2021, the COVID years). For a 41’000 square km country that doesn’t even have 9 million inhabitants! (that’s half the size of Andalusia in Spain for example, with the same number of inhabitants). With one WordCamp a year in Switzerland and all Meetup events, we are a very active community, if not the most active.

We have always organised WordCamp Switzerland for the whole country, even tough we were not allowed to call it “Switzerland” between 2016 and 2022 (called Geneva, Bern, Lausanne, Zurich, Geneva in those years)! We finally could have our name back in 2023 with WordCamp Switzerland and also organised the Switzerland Community Day in March 2024. People from all language regions of our country, and all Meetup groups, have always taken part in these events as organisers, speakers, volunteers, sponsors or attendees. It’s very easy, with an efficient rail network in a country that’s not even 350 km wide!

We applied for WordCamp Europe as the Swiss community, not the Basel group, so it didn’t matter that there had never been a local WordCamp in Basel itself. Basel was chosen among us, and initially suggested by Michelle Bulloch, to host WordCamp Europe for the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph above, Basel being “The Heart of Europe” and for its perfect venue.

About the application

As a co-organiser of this year WordCamp Europe 2024 in Torino (Volunteer Team lead), I discovered the requirements in terms of venue, with so many extra rooms necessary to hold the event! I followed the Local team meeting notes and took note of everything they were doing! This will be very useful for the next 12 months! Any local lead who wants to apply should join the upcoming edition’s organising team.

The Local team is helped since 2018 by a fantastic company called Production Pool, who knows all about the WordPress community, how we work and the fact that we are all volunteers! I’m delighted that we’ll be working closely with them for the next 12 months!

So after the Call for Host City was published in December, with all the requirements and fixed dates to pre-book the venue, we built a website, and got the help from the Basel Convention Bureau/Basel Tourism. We listed many things about the local community, about Basel and about the venue.

After our acceptance, four more persons from our local team (Michelle Bulloch, Claudio Rimann, Pascal Birchler and Philipp Zeder) joined the organisation of this year edition, like it’s traditionally the case every year. Since April, we’ve already had a few “local” tasks to do, like the reveal video and some conversations with the venue, and it was fun to be sort of co-organisers for 2 WordCamp Europe simultaneously 🙂

Personal take

I wasn’t a fan of the “competition” with the other local communities that applied! I love the way our WordPress community allow us to be ONE and help each other across the world. The competition part, like if we were the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup, didn’t sit well with me. I’ve proposed some changes for the future to the current main leads and event mentors to create a queue of interested cities, onboard future local leads and create the best events every year with everybody involved. Let’s see what decision will be made, and maybe this will only be for 2027 or later! And anyway, as said above, anyone who wants to apply next year should become an organiser for the upcoming edition. You can do so by responding to the Call for organisers which has just been published!

My months prior to the application were pretty full, I had joined the GatherPress team and made our official proposal in January, I was preparing my participation into Anne-Mieke’s project (Can Everyone Use) at the Cloudfest Hackathon, organising the Switzerland Community Day for March, and being an organiser of WordCamp Europe 2024 [link when post ready] as the Volunteer Team lead. For all these reasons, I got invited to 9 interviews over 2-3 months and contributed to WordPress much more than I actually worked for my professional projects Interaction.Site and WPMondo.

Thank you!

Many thanks to:

• my friends in the application team, I look forward to be working with you over the next 12 months!
• Cyon for hosting the application website for free,
• the Basel Convention Bureau team which helped us present the city, crafting the venue and catering offers, and create the wonderful video for the “reveal announcement” with Thomas from Die Filme Macherei
• the two 2024 applicants (Torino and another one) for their application websites from which we drew some inspiration,
• the 3 other 2025 applicants, for playing fair! 🤞 for 2026!
• some of my friends who were there for me during the process and encouraging me, giving me confidence, because it takes some guts to do it!
  (you know who you are 🧡)
• the people who gave us testimonials on the Swiss community for our application website, having participated in (and liked) past Swiss local WordCamp events. Among them, two past WCEU leads (Remkus de Vries and Milan Ivanović)!
• the 2024 and previous years’ leads, mentors and co-organisers.

Celebration

We were at the Cloudfest in Germany on 18 March 2024 when we got the news!
I will never forget that day for 3 reasons: the Basel application acceptance, the Cloudfest Hackathon project I took part in and which won 3 Hackathon awards that very same day, as well as another personal reason!
I’m here with Pascal Birchler (Swissspidy) and Philipp Zeder (Zedpelin) from the Local application team. It was such a moment of celebration to discover that we had been chosen!

We want to share our enthusiasm with you and will do everything we can to make WordCamp Europe 2025 the best time you’ll ever have!

We look forward to welcoming you all next year!

Header photo: Basler Münster / Basel Cathedral, copyright Basel Tourismus