That’s a Wrap

Thanks for coming to WordCamp SF. We hope you had a wonderful time!

In a few more days we’ll have collected all the recaps and links to the videos so we can post a proper wrap-up. But in the meantime, we sure would be grateful for your feedback. We have two surveys for you here: one for the WordCamp itself, and a separate one just to rate our speakers and give them some valuable input.

Thanks in advance!

http://wordcampcentral.polldaddy.com/s/wordcamp-attendee-survey

http://andmiddleton.polldaddy.com/s/wordcamp-sf-2014-speaker-reviews

Community Summit Day

Ah, the bittersweet end of WordCamp San Francisco’s main conference… We hope you all had a wonderful time, and have safe travels home. For those community leaders who are signed up for the community summit day today (Monday), we’re excited to talk today about the subjects that hove been cropping up in the summit forums, and to hear your feedback on the event as well as some of the exciting announcements Matt made in his State of the Word talk yesterday.

If you are expecting to attend the summit today, please review the schedule and logistical information that we posted yesterday, as it contains important specifics regarding the attendee list. Thanks!

Sunday Contributor Track

Were you wondering how people got the cute little icon buttons they were wearing on their lanyards yesterday? They contributed their time and energy to WordPress, and so can you!

Today in the downstairs room, all the different contributor teams from the WordPress open source project will be working on various projects, and they would love to get you involved. Each table will have a sign indicating which team is working there, so just head over and introduce yourself, and they’ll put you to work. Not sure what each team does? Stop by the Get Involved table near the Happiness Bar, and you can get more information.

To help the people who like things a little more formal, most of the teams will do a formal introduction to the work they do in the classroom area we’ll have partitioned off in the back part of the room. Here are the approximate times for those introductions — with open source volunteering, it’s a good idea to expect a little flexibility when it comes to timing. 🙂

09:00 – Support
09:25 – Docs
09:50 – WordPress.tv (inc. Subtitling)
10:15 – Training (creating curriculums)
10:30 – WordCamps/Meetups

STATE OF THE WORD SIMULCAST

LUNCH

14:00 – Theme Review Team
14:35 – Core
15:20 – Translators
15:50 – Meta (WordPress.org site and tools)
16:15 – GlotPress (translation software development)
16:45 – BuddyPress

If you are interested in subtitling videos for WordPress.tv, you’ll want to have a pair of headphones or earbuds.

Unclaimed WordCamp tickets to be removed today

WordCamp SF is less than 3 days away, wow! Seems like we’ve been waiting for this weekend forever, and excitement among the organizing team is at a peak.

We’ve made our lists and checked everything twice: badges, check. T-shirts, check. Lunch, check. But what we’ve also counted was over 50 unclaimed ticket purchases, yikes!

What’s an unclaimed ticket, you ask? Well, this year we introduced a registration flow that tied your WordCamp ticket purchase to  wordpress.org profiles. It’s been so cool to see all the WordPress.org profiles showing who’s bought tickets to WordCamp SF! An unclaimed ticket is one that was purchased but left blank of any registration info like name, t-shirt size, meal preference, and wordpress.org username — in short, all the information we need to know that it’s a real person and not a ticket squatter. 🙂

We ended up with a lot more unclaimed tickets than we thought we would, even after we emailed people a bunch of times with requests to confirm their ticket purchases (like before we ordered event badges and t-shirts). Next year we’ll build in some kind of automatic notices and returns, but in the meantime, we have to call time on this year’s registration.

Because we’re not sure if the people holding tickets with the name “Unknown Attendee” plan to attend WordCamp SF or not, and because hunting down the purchasers of over 50 unclaimed tickets at registration is going to make registration for the other 1000ish attendees pretty painful, we’re now going to refund all of those unclaimed tickets, removing them from our registration lists.

To be clear, this only affects you if your name was never even on a ticket. Only tickets with the name “Unknown Attendee” will be cancelled and refunded.

If you have been holding on to an unclaimed ticket and you DO plan to attend WordCamp SF, don’t freak out! We’ll be selling walk-in tickets at the door (and hand-writing name badges), so you won’t miss out on all the fun.

Can’t wait to see you all on Saturday morning!

What’s for lunch?

Your general admission ticket not only gets you in to Mission Bay Conference Center for two days of inspiring WordPress talks, it also gets you a swanky conference t-shirt and lunch on Saturday and Sunday!

If you have food allergies, dietary restrictions, or just a healthy appetite, you might be wondering what will be served at the buffet tables this weekend. Luckily for you, we’ve posted the lunch menus — including ingredients lists for each dish.

We’ve done our best to create meal options that will mean delicious dining for every attendee at WordCamp SF, regardless of allergies or special diets, but we can’t provide specialized single meals. If you’re unable to eat anything that we’re planning to serve, please plan to arrange your own lunch.  If you have a question about our lunch menu and ingredients list, please fill out the contact form to ask!

Parking at WordCamp San Francisco

If you’re driving to WordCamp San Francisco this weekend, you may be wondering where to find a parking place!

Mission Bay Conference Center

There are two main parking options that we recommend for Saturday and Sunday:

  • Parking Garage at 1625 Owens Street: 8 hours of parking for $30. For WCSF attendees there is a discount to $15. To take advantage of the discount you need to get a parking voucher from a WCSF volunteer and then pay at the garage as you leave. There is no in-and-out parking with this $15 voucher.
  • Fourth Street Surface Lot: on 4th Street, just north of 16th Street. This is only $3 per day, but is a bit of a walk from the venue.

All parking at Mission Bay is first-come, first-served, so please plan accordingly.

More info at http://campuslifeservices.ucsf.edu/transportation/services/parking/public_parking

After-party

Here are two parking garages that we recommend within 5 minutes walk of the Automattic Lounge at 132 Hawthorne:

California Parking 690 Harrison, SF, CA 94107
Archstone Parking 1 Saint Francis Place San Francisco, CA 94107

Surviving the World Series at WCSF

You may, or may not, have heard that the world series will be held in San Francisco this weekend. If you’re like me and you come from out of town, you might be wondering what a world series is. The world series is the annual championship series of the North-American baseball league. It’s sort of like the world cup, but with more hitting a ball with a bat and less kicking a ball with a foot.

The world series will be played in San Francisco 25th – 27th October.

What does this mean for me?

This weekend, you can expect a huge influx of baseball fans into San Francisco. Even more baseball fans than WordPress fans (if you can believe it!). Here’s what you need to know:

  • Games start at 5pm on Friday, Saturday, and possibly Sunday.
  • Car traffic will be particularly bad in the 2-3 hours prior to the event (from about 2pm onwards).
  • Car traffic will be bad again when the games get out (around 8pm – 9:30pm).
  • Trains will also be crowded during these times.
  • If you are driving to the Mission Bay Conference Center, park in the parking garage at 1625 Owens Street. Collect a discount voucher from the WCSF volunteers at Mission Bay and you’ll get a discount rate of $15 for the day. You can pay at the parking garage.
  • If you arrive in the morning and leave after 5:30 – 6pm you should avoid the worst of the traffic.
  • Parking will be difficult and/or expensive in the area near the Saturday social, the Automattic offices at 132 Hawthorne Street.
  • Restaurants will be more crowded than usual and wait times may increase. Either book ahead or plan to eat while the games are on.
  • There will be a lot of drunk fans in the SOMA area.
  • You can use the SFPark app to help you find parking spaces and keep up to date about traffic.
  • The 511 website has updates about public transport and traffic.

The games may end on Saturday but they may continue over the whole weekend. This depends on the wins from the games being held on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday this week.

If you have any questions or concerns get in touch, or grab one of our helpful volunteers over the weekend.

 

Introducing Sara Cannon

Sara Cannon is an artist, designer, creative thinker, business owner, developer, and dreamer. She’s a Partner and the Creative Director at Range: a Design and Development Agency specializing in WordPress.

In the beginning

In 2004, Sara was a design student in college when she  was searching for a CMS to use for an organisation she supports.

I put them on Joomla and thought “surely there is another option out there.” I stumbled upon WordPress and have been hooked ever since.

Since then she’s contributed to core, organised WordCamps and Meetups, and co-founded a WordPress business:

WordPress and the WordPress community is such a huge part of my life. I can’t imagine what I would be doing without it. #CheersToTheGPL

P1011162

As well as being a designer, Sara is a talented artist. Her work, at saracannonart.com is based on the intersection of organic shapes, geometry, and landscapes:

I thoroughly enjoy making art and believe that the exploration of form and imagery in a different medium makes be a better designer.  I really enjoy exploring stimulating geometric patterns and bright whimsical imagery.

Sara at WordCamps

WPYall

Sara is a WordCamp regular. In the past she’s been an organiser of WordCamp Birmingham. She’s attended 4 WordCamp San Franciscos alone, and spoke at two of them. “One of my favorite memories is hosting a launch party for Range in 2012 and inviting all of our close friends in the community (our WordPress family) to come and celebrate the new beginning with us.”

Sara’s first WordCamp presentation was at WordCamp Birmingham in 2009. The presentation, “WordPress and Your Brand”, went well, but unfortunately there was no microphone so she had to yell to be heard.

A slide from that presentation is a precursor to her presentation this year. It reads “good typography improves user experience.” This year she will talk about “Typography and User Experience.”

“Typography is everything” has been one of my mantras for many years. It is one of the most important aspects about visual communication, yet we rarely discuss it. It sets the tone, message, readability, as well as the experience in performing tasks. Typography can be so great that you don’t even notice it’s there when reading, or it can be so bad that it messes up your experience to the point of frustration (Like sending an article to a reader to avoid on-page distractions). Really, I believe that type is an important aspect of user experience and I’m super thrilled to be presenting on it an WordCamp San Francisco!

 

Accessing the WordCamp SF live stream

If you’ve purchased a live stream ticket to WordCamp SF, you’re in for a real treat! Enjoying WordCamp from the comfort of your living room, dining room table, or backyard is pretty fantastic. Haven’t bought a ticket yet? There’s still time: you can even buy a live stream ticket during the event.

The stream starts at 9:00am Pacific on Saturday, October 25 and 9:00am Pacific on Sunday, October 26, and will be available at https://2014.sf.wordcamp.org/live-stream/.

You will need to enter the following information to sign in:

  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • E-mail address

Please make sure you test that your computer can view the stream before the conference starts.

If you’d like to join in the conversation via Twitter, the event hashtag is #wcsf14.

If you miss any of the sessions on the live stream, don’t worry! All of the sessions will be recorded and posted on WordPress.tv over the coming weeks.

Enjoy the event, and we’ll see you in the stream!

Final speaker announcement

We kept a few surprises up our sleeves for the schedule next weekend. Please welcome our final round of speakers!

  • Pamela Bey is the founder of Be Brilliant Media, a web design and tech curriculum development agency. She is a WordPress trainer, UX designer, and mentor for women and children.
  • Jen Mylo (formerly Jane Wells) is a community organizer for the WordPress open source project; prior to this she spent four years as the UX lead and project manager of WordPress core.
  • Jeff Veen is the Vice President of Product Design for Adobe and the co-founder of Typekit.

October 25-26, 2014