WordcampNZ 2012- that’s a wrap

Wordcampnz is all about creating an affirming space with the best coffee, best people & looking for those magic moments and happy accidents.

Why have a musician talk about his website when you can hear him sing a song he wrote ? And why say good bye when you can sing goodbye.

That would be like asking rugby players to talk about their game. No wait 🙂 MSM does that all the time and it is actually the wrong way around.

Luke Hurley was a (in all but name) lightning speaker but wouldn’t have done it if we had asked him to be a speaker. He was there as a WordPress user whose core content is songs and music. Asking Luke to talk about his website would have been the wrong thing to do. And perfectly ok to take it at the level of “at the end we had this local singer come and play a few songs” but really were were wanting to engage on more than one level.

In my opinion what Luke does best are songlines and these are best understood not by talking about the songs but by hearing them sung. We also wanted to have a counterpoint to the earlier welcome by @digitalMaori so he also performed a mihi for a largely non- Maori* audience in a way that they didn’t even know that is what it was. (*Macron support broken sorry.)

At other NZ wordcamps we’ve wanted to to acknowledge Maori, but not in that fake corporate way that sometimes happens so having Nik & Poutaua do that in a really natural organic way – “priceless” as they say in bank adland.

The reason there were 3 songs is that the last one “Make Room”  was part of the services to the WordPress community award for @radiowammo who is Glenn Williams.

Glenn is a national treasure. But here’s the thing – I’ve been there a few times and if you were to ask a staff member of one of the stations in the building where he works – most staff don’t know who he is or which studio he is in. I love that he is in effect hiding in plain view.

RadioWammo is like a secret project that flies under the radar most of the time.

We know though and the 2,313+ videos on YT plus all of the other projects he does is magnificent contribution to NZ culture and all kinds of exploration and engagement via his radio and video shows.

Show us the art, the vision – the big idea – WordPress is an enabler not an end in itself.

Wordcamp is not about “show ussome code” it is show us the poetry – but most people don’t get that part. Luckily there always some who do… It may sound counter intuitive but if a customer visits your website (on WordPress of course) and just wants to talk about your website instead of engage at a series of other levels with you and your content then that is the wrong conversation.

We could argue that other web people want to do exactly that but now all day and after 8 hrs of talks and presentations we wanted to mark the transition with the ukelele and Lukes songs so we could move onto the after party.

Wordcamps should be like the first rule of fightclub; 1st rule don’t talk about fightclub.

So first rule of wordcampnz is don’t talk about wordcampnz sounds crazy but it works better that way & it is not a literal thing and in many ways you have to be there to get the vibe.

Excited About WordcampNZ Rahul Singh (Go Unitec) on storify for Day 1 captures some of this if you read all the pages.

Vaughn Davis ran rings around everyone on twitter – just like he does in that plane of his. You can take him out of the plane but he is going to be low flying that special intersection of insight, plain silliness and laugh out loud stand up.

I’m looking forward to the day we can have a WordCamp where no one mentions WordPress (not going to happen but) that is the territory we are heading into.

 

WordPress & the best wordcamps work because it/they get out of the way and allow us all to be creative and connected and ultimately transformed by that engagement.

As Giapo says “there is no secret sauce”

Passionate people sharing in a way that works for them with invisible technology support. You get the idea 🙂

My coffee this morning was especially great..