Having volunteered at the Develop: Brighton game developer’s conference since 2023, I stepped up to be the Lead Volunteer for Develop: North in November 2024 and am continuing as Co-Lead for Brighton for the 2025 event and the forseeable future.

Lead Conference Associate (Starting 2025) · Management · Communication · Admin Systems

I joined as Lead Volunteer for Develop with their return to Liverpool for Develop:North in November 2024, and continued with Develop:Brighton in July 2025, managing a team of 40 volunteers across 4 days. To improve upon previous management systems, I designed a new scheduling system in Google Sheets and integrated Apps Script functions to evenly distribute work across each volunteer and ease transition periods, which was very positively recieved.

Feedback from volunteers: ‘This year went flawlessly compared to previous years.’

Feedback from organisers: ‘This was the best volunteer team we’ve ever had.’

During this time, I have helped restructure the volunteer management systems to support the growing number of volunteers needed to accomodate the 5000< visitors to the conference. In 2024, I helped with the transition to a spreadsheet based schedule and used a primitive conditional formatting system to help volunteers indentify what shifts they were registered under, though since then I have created a bespoke system which will save roughly 4-5 hours per volunteer per year based on personal experience of the previous scheduling system. For the 2025 conference, this is expected to save 200 hours of volunteer work across the 3 day event.

The system will also allow for volunteers to have a more equal experience across the event than in previous years, as shifts will be distributed evenly and based on each volunteers preference.

We trialled this new approach for Develop: North in 2024 to great success with very little questions or confusion from any volunteers after the initial training, despite the fact that this was a new venue for Tandem Events, was only a one day event with 400< attendees, was my first time leading a large team, and all other volunteers at this event were entirely new to Develop.