Tag Archives: WordCamp

WordCamp Mid-Atlantic: Where It’s Been, Where It’s Going

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Late in 2008, while I was transitioning from life in Baltimore to life outside of Washington, D.C., I was contemplating organizing the first WordCamp event in that area. Baltimore had begun to show signs of a healthy tech community and Washington had continued to flourish as a healthy communications scene. Philadelphia, just up I-95, had a healthy design and development community and I had become somewhat familiar with that city as well.

I made a point of making my event one that would set trends and challenge the status quo.

Mid-Atlantic

One thing I did think of early on was that I detested the trend that identified an event with a singular city, especially when there were multiple cities, all offering different, yet complementary modus operandi. I bucked the trend of identifying the event by a city, eschewing names like WordCamp DC or WordCamp Baltimore. These names, while celebratory of the city that hosts them, inherently bear the problem of inferred exclusivity.

From the very first WordCamp in the region, I challenged that designation and attempted to bring the cities together. It was called WordCamp Mid-Atlantic.

Three Cities, then Two

The original plan was to bring the three cities together in Baltimore for a WordPress event. Ideally, the result would be more collaboration and resources shared between the various communities. Ultimately, Philadelphia never bought into Mid-Atlantic (and in fact, ended up with their own successful WordCamp Philly). However, Mid-Atlantic was wildly supported by both Baltimore and DC. even garnering coverage in the Baltimore Sun business publication Maryland Daily Record.

For WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2010, the event was geared mainly to the Washington Metro and Baltimore.

Keynotes That Challenge

In both events, I wanted to bring in someone from the WordPress leadership hierarchy as a Keynote as well as someone from outside of WordPress entirely to challenge the gathered attendees. This as quite controversial, actually. In 2009, I brought in Anil Dash, founder and former SVP at SixApart. Anil was known historically as somewhat of an antagonist, but did a wonderful job in sharing and illustrating the similarities between WordPress and SixApart who provided a competing platform. His message was one of learning from each other.

This past year, I opted to bring in Marco Tabini who has also been a frequent antagonist of WordPress. His message was one from the perspective of the PHP community and reconciling how the PHP core people could learn and help the WordPress core people, and vica versa. My inbox became a little tense in the weeks leading up to the event due to other incidents involving dissenting views about the GPL license and WordPress’interpretation of it. Needless to say, Marco did an amazing job.

It’s Not My Baby

As most of you know, I have left the Baltimore/Washington region. As a result, this past WordCamp Mid-Atlantic was my last. People have asked me quite a lot about who I would pass the baton to. This is a tricky question because the event is not mine. It’s yours.

That said, this is not for just anyone to run. I cannot put any strings on who will run the next event but I do have the platform to voice my sentiments:

  • I want to see Mid-Atlantic stay in the event. I do not want to see a fractured event where there becomes a WordCamp Baltimore and a WordCamp DC. Both cities have user groups that meet frequently. I want to see the WordCamp Mid-Atlantic event retain it’s place as a regional/local event.
  • I want to see the idea of challenging (and even dissenting) opinions welcomed to the stage, like Marco… and Anil. We should not be scared of being shaken up. We should embrace it and learn from it. That said, future organizers should be sensitive as to who you have come and speak.
  • Retain the unconference. One of the amazing success stories of WordCamp Mid-Atlantic 2010 was the unconference, organized by Steve Fisher. Besides the pre-scheduled and organized tracks that are familiar to conference goers, we provided a separate, yet equal unconference for ad-hoc discussion and talks. The only thing I’d change is to make it true barcamp style and make a no-powerpoint rule.
  • No one organizer. I became the defacto organizer for both events. While I had varying degrees of help for both, I really became the guy for the event. This was not wise on my part. There should be an organizer in each city.

This is Baltimore’s event. This is Washington’s event. This event brilliantly integrated both communities. It really, really did. I want to see it continue (obviously with new leadership), but I want it to be with people who take it seriously and can make it better than it ever was. Put your own spin on it. Make it your own, not mine.

WordPress and WordPress MU to Merge

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This is the first year I did not attend WordCamp San Francisco, the annual event that is the largest of the WordCamp gathering. It seems like I’m missing the announcement of some big news.

Matt Mullenweg announced during his State of the Word speech, thaa going forward, WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi-user) would be merged. In principle, this is not all that surprising, as WPMU offers a single major feature that WordPRess single user does not – the ability to have multiple blogs with a single install.

In talking to attendees of the event, there were few details given in this announcement but conventional wisdom suggests that, either during the installation process or later down the road, a blog administrator would have the ability to “flip a switch” and turn on the capabilities of the WordPress MU system.

This seems to segue with an earlier announcement from the event that the BuddyPress plugins that turn a WPMU installation into a social network, would be made available as compatible with WordPress blogs.

It’s also unclear when this merging of streams will actually occur, but my best guess is WordPress 2.9.

More details as we get them.

SixApart Engaging WordPress, and Other Thoughts on WordCamp Mid-Atlantic

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It was a brilliant day on Saturday at University of Baltimore where Jimmy Gardner and I kicked off the inaugural WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. I have been to half a dozen or more WordCamps since the first one in San Francisco in July of 2006. Without being at all conceited, because it had nothing really to do with me, this was the best one yet.
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WordCamp Mid-Atlantic Approaches

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WordCamp Mid-Atlantic is five days away (May 16) and things are beginning to fall into place. This is my first attempt at event organizing and I definitely have learned some tough lessons along the way. It’s also been tremendously helpful and rewarding for me. I’m looking forward to this thing coming in to land though.

Along the way, people have been asking me, “What the heck is WordCamp?” If you’ve never experienced an unconference, it might be hard to explain. In essence, it’s a loosely organized event put together to draw the WordPress community out, share experiences, instruct, learn, network and connect. WordCamp is a one day event that will have a variety of speakers, a technical and basic track, plenty of open space to launch into small groups if people felt inclined and basically learn from each other.

WordCamps are typically geared toward a particular city. I chose to lead a new regional-based event that is focused on Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The event is held in Baltimore because it’s centrally located, and the blogging/social media/technical scene is least developed there out of the three cities. Baltimore has significant potential and has some great leaders in the community. I hope our event will spur that forward.

I’m excited about this opportunity and grateful to my co-organizer, Jimmy Gardner, all the sponsors and speakers and the attendees who, with very little marketing, sold this thing out. It’s awesome to see such a great engagement.

Announcing WordCamp Mid-Atlantic

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Mark your calendars for May 16, 2009. This is the date for the first WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, a regional WordCamp organized for WordPress users in Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia.

We have locked down the venue as University of Baltimore Thumel Business Center, which has also been the facility for a variety of other events – most notably, SocialDevCampEast. It is in proximity to major transportation hubs, including Amtrak.

We are launching the website and information about the event with the announcement that WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, will be attending (and speaking). Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay up to date on speakers and other information you’re going to need and I look forward to seeing you in Baltimore!

Update: We’ve announced that Matt Mullenweg and Anil Dash of SixApart will be the Keynotes.

Findability is a Legitimate Concern for Bloggers

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On Saturday, I posted a review of my session at WordCamp on Search and Findability. It was hard to gauge at that time how effective the session was at the time I wrote that. Beside my normal annual attendance at WordCamp as a subject matter expert, and several sessions at different WordCamps around the country over the past few years, I was there on behalf of Lijit.

In fact, when I pitched the session on search to Matt (as a core interest of Lijit), I was firmly instructed (as I suspected I would be) that hard pitching the company was off limits. From my perspective as a member of the WordPress community, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It was the same approach that we took at b5media. The company was represented. The company was known as a WordPress shop. We shared war stories with other WordPress shops. But no one on stage at any point pitched b5. It’s non-standard, I think, for any company to pitch their wares at any *Camp.

Instead, my session was about findability. Findability is the concept that content can be “found” by readers. This is a common problem that many bloggers wrestle with, and many have tried a wide variety of techniques to make their blogs more findable. This is not the same as SEO, though. SEO is a subset of findability. It’s findability for machines. Findability is as much about the data structure as the content or theme structure or the device compatibility (is it mobile compatible, for instance?)

Our product at Lijit tries to address a lot of the issues of findability. Re-search provides relevant search data to readers coming from the search engines (think landing pages). It makes all the bloggers content findable by indexing not just the site, but all the other related content associated with the user.

What I found interesting, and that I did not know when I wrote my post, was that the rest of the day would reinforce the core principles of my session. Tantek Çelik expounded on Microformats. There was an SEO session. Numerous bloggers talked to me throughout the day explaining solutions that they have come up with for making a blog more findable. Solutions ranged from content practices, to theme structures to custom homegrown plugins that do various things. It was fascinating.

I realize now what I thought I realized then, but didn’t really realize until now. All bloggers are faced with the same core challenges. The challenges manifest themselves in different ways, but at the end of the day findability is on the forefront of everyones minds.

  1. All bloggers want to drive traffic. Whether the traffic is internal, a key interest of those in the SEO/SEM/Ad space, or within their sphere of influence, an interest of bloggers looking to build their personal brand.
  2. All bloggers want to provide value to readers. No blogger wants search engine traffic to go away. Everyone wants to find a way to keep that traffic and convert it into value, whether ad-driven or otherwise, for their blog
  3. Bloggers are grappling with ways to break apart from the pack. 99.999% of blogs (a totally random number) really look the same at the end of the day. I don’t mean the user interface, but I do mean the theme structure. Structures are built in expected way, and modules/widgets are expected to behave similar ways, regardless of the blog
  4. WordPress cannot solve all the problems of all the blogs. Keep in mind that WordPress is a tool, not a lifestyle. (And I’d say the same thing to social media aficionados). WordPress is evolving into something, but much of the value that bloggers can add, allowing themselves to be different or drive more traffic (see point 1 or 2), are created by smart people trying to bring a solution to a problem.
  5. At the end of the day, every bloggers wants a kickass community of readers and commenters that reinforce their worth in the world. Kathy Sierra talks about creating passionate users, and she’s talking about principles of an engaged community. Findability helps the community engage.

Doing a 9am session is hard. Everyone is still sleepy, and/or hung over, jetlagged, etc. At the end of my session, I felt like I said what I needed to say. However, by the end of the weekend, I realized that much of WordCamp reinforced exactly the concerns that I brought up to kick off the opening session. That’s encouraging to me as a WordPress user and as someone who tries to understand the dynamics of the greater community. Of course, it encourages me as a Lijit guy as I see that our product can directly address many of the challenges that I heard repeated throughout the weekend.