Dear Friends!

My name is Eliza, and I’m the newest member of the ESS organizing committee. I’m writing to ask a favor: If you’re planning on attending Epic Skill Swap this year, it would be extraordinarily helpful to us if you would register ASAP. This will help us to do our planning (and will also ease our minds a little, since the cost of Skill Swap is split among the attendees, and so the more people we have registered, the more affordable ESS is for everyone).

Additionally, I wanted to address something about the two weekend model that we adopted last year: ESS Weekend A and ESS Weekend B are not quite the same. The nature of Skill Swap is that the experience is formed by the people who attend. The organizers aren’t trying to manicure two identical weekends, and so each weekend is always unique.

For example, you may have noticed that this year, Weekend A has fewer workshops on the schedule than Weekend B. Put another way, Weekend A has more space to evolve as it happens. If you didn’t get a chance to propose a workshop, or if you proposed two workshops and one was not selected, you can (and we think should!) bring that workshop to Weekend A! Speaking from my experience last year, a weekend that evolves as it goes is a really cool experience. Weekend B will also be cool and have some space for last-minute workshop additions, but will probably be a little more structured and predictable.

If the idea that the two weekend are going to be different is just killing you, because you don’t want to miss out on either experience, why not come to both? (Remember, we have a sliding cost scale!) If that’s not an option, but you haven’t decided which weekend to attend, then we ask that you consider attending Weekend A, which will need lots of cool attendees with great ideas to help fill in all those inviting open workshop slots!

Please also remember to share the wonders of Skill Swap with your friends and networks! If you know someone who would just love ESS, now is the time to send them the link to the registration page!

With Skill Swap it’s not just “the more the merrier.” It’s that as a community, we are greater than the sum of our parts, and the more parts, the greater the whole.

We can’t wait to see you at Epic Skill Swap 2017!

Eliza — and the rest of the organizing team: Alison, Annie, Dana, Ethan, Meghan, Onnie, and Rachel