thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Earlier this morning I was privileged to be on Radio Wammo live talking about this years #wordcampnz in Auckland next Saturday 21st of April. We talked about who should come along, why and what it is all about.

The format is q & a with no real script. Glenn Williams does this every day and once the talk is over the video goes up on the Radio Wammo site within minutes.

RadioWammo runs on WordPress (as do many media sites now.)  It is radio with the added zest of being able to watch it either live on ustream or later off the site. Below is my post on the wordcampnz site

“Glenn Williams is a tech media whiz. His @radiowammo show is a treasure trove of radio shows with great people such as Vaughn Davis, Jayson Bryant, Ben Young, Russell Brown and even a very long running series with Sam Hunt.

What is different about Radio Wammo is that Glenn live mixes the video on air. The various shows are on each weekday between 7am & 10am (UTC 1900-2200) and on demand 24/7 at other times.

The show is mostly completely unscripted and completely live with no edits – enjoy. Questions and comments as always are very welcome.”

“P.S – For wordcampers – Glenn will be doing a lightning talk on Saturday afternoon about Radio Wammo see our latest speaker announcement.

I forgot to mention we will filming all speakers on Saturday and making a mixtape DVD of the results for #wordcampnz attendees. BTW – we won’t be live streaming since there are some bandwidth challenges with our particular location although we may try to do some of that if we can.

Sites mentioned in the show:

• TangataWhenua.com    speakers Nik & Potaua see speakers
• Paleo Zone Nutrition speaker Julianne Taylor
• Crown Fibre Holdings speaker (the writer – Jason Kemp)
• NZ Womans Weekly“

Special feature (WordPress example in the show) have a look at the Crown Fibre site. CFH is all about the Ultra Fast Broadband rollout in NZand is a project that I have been working on for quite some time. It has been completely rebuilt in WordPress and I’m delighted to have been the developer on the project.

Will do a separate post about that – please let me know what you think about the video and do come along to #wordcampnz next weekend.

In February I was fortunate enough to be part of a dual  event held in Wellington, NZ and a week later in Melbourne.

As one of the NZ organisers we curated a number of talks on what WordPress users are doing here; as well as how they do some of that. All of the talks were good and a number of links and photos from Wellington are to be found over here.

I really enjoyed a panel discussion on the future of blogging & related matters which featured David Farrar of Kiwiblog, John Ford of Automattic, Julie Starr from Evolving Newsroom, Richard MacManus of RWW and Lance Wiggs.

Some of that was captured on video and other notes were scribbled down. I’m hoping to write up some of those key quotes when I get a moment.

What I particularly liked is the idea that you can invite a little chaos into the process and so I was delighted when DiscourseNZ duo – Ben Gracewood and Morgan Nichol agreed to come along and give a taster of their show. It was an excellent end to the day.

On Sunday we had some more hands on sessions and finished with a ukelele trio called the Custom Post Types who sang a song about CSS called the curly bracket blues. Really you had to be there

A week later I was in Melbourne for WordCamp Melbourne. It was a great event with a full range of presentations – many of whom were recorded on video – well done guys.

The video archive for #wcmelb is over here at Blip TV

As with any event like these it was very useful to hear people approaching many of the same topics from different perspectives and sharing those experiences.

At the event was Kym Huynh from WordCast who recorded a short talk with me. Ironically it lasted about 8 mins and I later did a 5 minute lighting talk covering some of the same ideas in the main room.

There was no script and it is always a little scary to see one self on video but I reckon it turned out well. I’m sure Kym did some great editing in there. (Thanks Kym)

Were you at WordCampNZ in Wellington on Feb 19th & 20th or WordCamp Melbourne on Feb 26th & 27th. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Many of you know that I have been very busy working on #wordcampnz for the past 3 months. We just hosted 110+ of you at Unitec in Mt Albert on all things related to WordPress and the users.

These are my personal thoughts however a version of this post will soon be over on the WordCampNZ.

As one of the organisers and the Auckland based host thought I’d give a bit more background on what we are doing here & where it might go to in the future.

Background

First up thanks for all the feedback – offline and online about – everything related to #wordcampnz.

On content of presentations can we say that we haven’t done our our jobs right if you don’t hate some of the presenters / presentations – because at the very same time others in the audience are loving it. It is a user generated conference and each user has a slightly differing perspective.

There is really only a problem if everyone likes all presentations. That means we are being mediocre and playing it way too safe.

This year we picked wordcampnz speakers that we thought would enlighten, engage, inspire and surprise and we expected some of them might even push some other buttons. These people are just like bloggers.

Wait – they are bloggers – and all of them blogging in one way or another. Like them you can have a blog in 30 seconds and away you go. Join the revolution any time you want.

“There are over 25 million WordPress publishers as of June 2010: 11.4 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.”

See usage stats for WordPress over here . This is all great but core contributors are in the low hundreds and as a community -we need to do better and get plugin & theme developers paid. Many plugin developers give away 95% of their plugins with no donations at all and that is just plain wrong.

This is not a beat up (just quietly) but a reality check is needed on many open source projects, not just the WordPress one. We all need to make more donations to developers and hire them for bigger projects when we get the chance. So please do check out those speakers.

While talking with the local WordPress community we did also come across a few awesome developers & contributors who are a tad burnt out & sadly couldn’t make it this time.

Last year we did the first #wordcampnz users event in Wellington at the Mt Vic Bowling Club. Around 110 locals and others attended including Matt Mullenweg

The really cool thing about #wordcampnz 2010 is that 90% of you were not at Wellington last year.

And its not because you are WordPress newbies. Once again we are awestruck by the talent & sites we’ve seen. Just at random check out Sam at Boolean Gareth Price – WorkWorkWork Lee at leetewal who all made it and Slamxhype who couldn’t be here.  Adam from Slamxhype started in Grey Lynn & is now huge in London, Tokyo, New York and all around the world.

TED Blog is on WordPress – see the showcase details over at WordPress.org.

What is Next?

WordCampNZ is all voluntary with a core group of trustees plus volunteers who all helped out on the day. We registered a charitable trust and we need some accounting and other resource to keep all of that sweet. Thanks to all of those who did help.

I know some WordPress developers are working up to 18 hrs a day on keeping their clients happy. Often they are the very same people who help out on wordcamps and the like.

Many of us work on low budget projects cos we like them but that doesn’t cut it with the bank manager or the accountants so (as a community) we do need to get better organised.

Juggling passion and business is a balancing act. This morning my daughter asked me how much $ I make in my job and I did my best to explain that it is not always about the $. That for me and many of us with families we plan our day around being able to be there for them as much as possible. Being with your family and being “present” when you are there is not always easy but it is extremely rewarding.

Many of the #wordcampnz community are highly action oriented. For my own business I love working with non-profits and causes because they are highly focussed.  They don’t have the big budgets so they need to make every media interaction and contact work.

If you came along to #wordcampnz 2010 and didn’t get enough (technical) detail please be aware that the speakers & presenters do need to get paid for their hard won IP at some time. We will put up some slides from this years event however some of the slides will be slightly different that what was presented for that reason.

No one is complaining. However…

It would be great to get some new trustees & share the workload a bit better. Anthony is now living in Melbourne. To put it in perspective he was 18 when he co-organised WordCamp Australia in Nov 2008. Hats off for that. Dan’s company Instinct is sitting on a rocket ship with more than 500,000 downloads of the wp-ecommerce plugin. So Dan is way busy. I have some adventures of my own that I’m excited about and so it is a good time to get wider community involvement on the organising side. To help with that we will get a work list out.

We are extremely grateful for our corporate sponsors Unitec, MagnumMac, DPS, Sitehost, AllGoodBananas and others like TweetTwins, Vaughn Davis, Catherine Arrow, Fraser at BrightMindLabs, Idealog Magazine.

The person who bought in the chocolate cake deserves a medal

Berend de Boer says on twitter

“#wordcampnz was very political, far too many greenie causes, and even someone running for political office, potentially a $60,000 job.”

“A #wordcampnz was quite different from a #drupal event, far more for wordpress users than wordpress developers”  on twitter

But wait – the cake came from one those political greenies and was a really nice thing to do.

Thanks also Berend for the compliment about the event being more for users. That is exactly why so many “regular” non-developers use WordPress. But with a full day of tech related sessions in room 2 (also for designers) we did cover most of the development stream. There were also 2 open source developers that we had hoped could make it but in the end they didn’t.

We did have a couple of sessions that could have been swapped over e.g Security should have been in tech room and Dan’s e-commerce presentation was probably more general. However security is an important topic and we wanted to pay close attention to that.

In my personal view having content with a cause or causes makes it real and passionate people make better speakers. My personal highlights were Courtney Lamberts oprah exercise and Justin & Sam from Vitallink. Richard from Dept of Doing all made my top 3 but everyone was good.

Content anywhere and especially online is really hitting the spot when it gets people off their butts and prompts them into action.

With your permission we would like to send out a monthly email to keep the #wordcampnz conversation going.It would also be really useful if we can implement BuddyPress and use that locally in NZ and Australia to link up the WordPress communities here.

GigaOM Pro is the kind of BuddyPress site that we should be able to use and develop in ANZ

We will keep up the social media and there are well advanced plans for two wordcamps in Wellington and Melbourne in about 6 months time.

More about that later but the general plan is to combine resources for ANZ so we can cover more territory and get you some speakers from the US, UK and elsewhere.

Thanks again. Please let me /us know your comments. Keep in touch as we will load up photos, slideshows and other resources as soon as we can.

As always let me know what you think in comments here or via twitter.