Submitting a site application
Before you actually go to globalgamejam.org and click on "Start a Jam Site" button (available from late September/early October each year), make sure you have secured a venue for your jam site. If you are still negotiating with the venue management on whether they are going to let you use the space or not, or if you are still seeking a suitable location and have nothing concrete yet, we won't be able to further process and approve your site.
After you've secured a venue, simply click on the "Start a Jam Site" button, and then fill the essential fields in the form. Please be prepared to fill the following items:
Jam site name
A picture of the venue or your choice of logo to represent your jam site (optional, but very nice to have).
Address (essential) and building name (optional).
Your jam site details including:
URL to your ticket page
A twitter hashtag of choice
URL to your live stream
Food options
Auditorium space and all kinds of optional facilities.
Almost all of these are optional, as it depends on how "formal" you want your site to be -- we won't disqualify your site because of the lack of these. You are also able to come back and add these later as you confirm them.
Participation details to let your jammers know how to signup with you and/or if there are any specific rules or notices you have for your jam site. The help texts on the form should be able to help you filling these.
There is space on the form to link to previous GGJ sites that you have organised, and also give us a brief description of your past GGJ and general event organising experience. This will be shared with our Regional Organiser team only, and will not be made public.
Filling your contact email and phone number on the application is required, and again will not be shared publicly. This will be used by your regional organiser to contact you, and by GGJ staff if there is a emergency, so please make sure that these are active and something you check frequently!
Read through GGJ Organiser Responsibility Statement carefully and sign your name if you agree.
Finally, at the bottom of the page, we usually setup "Registration Closed" by default so that after your site gets approved, you can choose when to actually start accepting participants.
After you've completed and submitted the form, usually within one week, you will be contacted by one of the GGJ Regional Organisers for an on-boarding interview. There are a few reasons we do this:
Make sure you are responsive, and can be reached when needed.
Answer any questions you may have about running a GGJ site.
Communicate important guidelines and rules that we expect site organisers and jammers to follow.
Most importantly, creating a connection to the community. For most of the Regional Organisers, we actually learn a great deal about game dev scene in different countries and cities from this process. We hope that, in turn, site organisers can be part of this global family and learn from each other as well.
Last but not least, we will be inviting you to Slack after the on-boarding process. The main form of GGJ communication is now based on our Slack channel, which connects you to thousands of jam site organisers.
We encourage you to be active on Slack, and engage with the GGJ community all over the world. Most importantly, we send all important announcements and essential documents from GGJ officials such as Keynote videos, theme announcements and helpful documents such as Upload Instructions. See more details about this in our guide to using Slack.
If you are unclear on any part of the process and need support, or if your Regional Organiser has not been in touch after your site has been submitted for over 7 days, feel free to get in touch with us.
