Category Archives: WordCamp

WordCamp conferences and WordPress community events around the world.

Gutenberg in Portland Oregon and Podcasts

I’ve had the opportunity to talk about Gutenberg at two great venues recently. The first was at WordCamp Portland which graciously allowed me to join for a Q&A at the end of the event. The questions were great and covered a lot of the latest and greatest about Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0:

Last week I also joined Episode 101 of the WP Builds podcast, where as Nathan put it: “We talk about Gutenberg, why Matt thinks that we need it, and why we need it now. We go on to chat about how it’s divided the WordPress community, especially from the perspective of users with accessibility needs.”

They may be out of seats already, but I’ll be on the other coast to do a small meetup in Portland, Maine this week. As we lead up to release and WordCamp US I’m really enjoying the opportunity to hear from WordPress users of all levels all over the country.

State of the Word, 2016

The full video and Q&A from 2016’s State of the Word last week in Philadelphia is now online. This year was especially exciting because it wasnt’ just a look back at the previous year, but sets out a new direction for where WordPress will be in 2017 and beyond.

If you want just the slides, here they are:

Like every year, there was a ton of help bringing this together. Mark Uraine led the slides, and at various points these folks pitched in as well: Mel Choyce, Tammie Lister, Michael Arestad, Ashleigh Axios, Ian Dunn, Corey McKrill, Martin Remy, Josepha Haden, Alex Kirk, Marina Pape, Alx Block, Cami Kaos, Matias Ventura, Donncha O Caoimh, John Maeda, Barry Abrahamson, Nikolay Bachiyski, Chrissie Pollock, Sam Sidler, Boris Gorelik, Dion Hulse, Brooke Dukes, Sarah Blackstock. I also got input and suggestions from Petya Raykovska, Tony Perez, Joe Casabona, Helen Hou-Sandi, Jon Bossenger, Jason Cohen, Daniel Bachhuber, Drew Butler, Ryan Boren, Andrew Roberts, Joost de Valk, Stephane Daury, Dion Hulse, Gary Pendergast, David Bisset, Ryan McCue, Alex Shiels, Brian Krogsgard, Joe Hoyle, Sean Blakeley, Andrew Nacin, Mark Jaquith, John Blackbourn, and thank you to Rose Kuo for inspiring the poetry theme which featured prominently this year.

Tavern and Post Status wrote up the talk itself. As a follow-up I did interviews with both to expand on some of what was discussed in the speech. The Post Status one is now up and you can watch it here:

Later today (3:45pm ET) I’ll deliver my annual State of the Word speech, which I’m very excited about. If you’d like to watch remotely, this year live stream tickets are free and you can tune in here.

WordCamp USThere were amazing applications for teams and cities to host the inaugural WordCamp US, a concept originally floated at the State of the Word last year. It was very hard to make a choice, but can now announce that the birthplace of the United States, Philadelphia, will host the first WCUS on December 4th–6th. They will also host it in 2016, but no dates have been chosen yet.

Having it the same place two years in a row allows us to keep logistics a set variable and really focus on the rest of the event in the second year. I also want to use it to facilitate experience transfer: We’ll choose the 2017 + 2018 host city in between the first and second event, so that team can volunteer on the ground the second year Philadelphia hosts it to learn from their experience. Hat tip: Cool graphic by Andrew Bergeron.

As was just announced, I’m going to make a not-surprise appearance at WordCamp Scranton next Saturday. It’s their first year doing a Wordcamp and I was able to find some space in my schedule to swing by in between business meetings in New York and Philadelphia, so very much looking forward to meeting the Scranton community.

https://twitter.com/WCScranton/status/619508207283625984

I’ll be doing a town hall Q&A at WordCamp Europe in Seville tomorrow (Friday) around 2 PM. I’m looking forward to catching up with the WordPress community from around Europe and the world, especially ma.tt readers!

We’re trying something new this year: instead of WordCamp San Francisco being the main WordCamp event of the year doing a WordCamp US in a rotating city. I’ve heard some great in-person pitches for places like Phoenix already. Do you think your city would be the coolest place in the 50 states for the first ever WordCamp US? Submit your city in this new survey. It’s open until the end of the month.

The past two days I’ve been at WordCamp San Francisco and the presentations have been amazing. For the first time ever for San Francisco we’ve had a really fantastic live video stream going from both rooms. It’s a pretty economical way to get all of the content of the conference without the cost of coming to San Francisco. We even had someone streaming from Pakistan! My talk on the State of the Word, will be tomorrow at 11 AM PST so get a ticket on the WordCamp SF site.