Speakers

Scott Berkun

Scott was a manager at Microsoft from 1994-2003, on projects including v1-5 (not 6) of Internet Explorer. He is the author of three bestselling books, Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, and Confessions of a Public Speaker. He works full time as a writer and speaker, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes Magazine, The Economist, The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, National Public Radio, and other media. He regularly contributes to Harvard Business and BusinessWeek, has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington, and has appeared as an innovation and management expert on MSNBC and on CNBC. He writes frequently on innovation and creative thinking at his surprisingly popular blog, scottberkun.com, and tweets at @berkun.

Scott will present “The Future of WordPress.”

Allan Cole

Allan Cole is a web designer and developer based in Brooklyn, NY. He specializes in front-end user experience and WordPress customization. He is currently developing a small business rooted in custom WordPress design development called fthrwght (Feather Weight). He can be found online at his portfolio and his WordPress blog.

Daniel Cook

Daniel Cook is a veteran game designer who runs the popular game design website Lostgarden.com. He writes extensively on the techniques, theory and business of game design. He currently works at Microsoft, was a professional illustrator in his youth and managed to collect both a degree in physics and an MBA. His most recent project, Ribbon Hero, turns Microsoft Office into a social game.

Daniel will present “Office Hero and How It Could Apply to WordPress.”

Michael “mitcho” Erlewine

mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) is a linguist, coder, and teacher in Somerville, MA, whose work lies at the intersection of the internet and human language. He is the developer of the popular Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and HookPress, developed After the Deadline for Firefox for Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), and has spoken at WordCamp Boston and WordCamp Tokyo. He has previously worked at Mozilla Labs and has been a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. He is currently a PhD student in linguistics at MIT.

Yoav Farhi

By day, Yoav is an Happiness Engineer at Automattic. By night, he wanders around trying to make sure WordPress works seamlessly with languages written from Right To left.

Yoav will present a lightening session on Right To Left Languages support in WordPress

Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel is an open source developer, author, and copyright reform activist. After working on CVS and writing “Open Source Development With CVS” (Coriolis, 1999), he went to CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” (O’Reilly, 2005). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google in 2006, he left to found QuestionCopyright.org. He now works at Canonical, Ltd and at QuestionCopyright.org, and writes and speaks regularly on copyright, open source, and the application of open source principles to areas outside software. His home page is red-bean.com/kfogel.

Karl will present “Bodysurfing the Blogosphere: How an Audience-Distributed Film Won Big.”

John Ford

Is it a bird? A plane? It’s John Ford! Don’t be fooled by the fact he’s traveled to 30+ countries (and counting) for work and pleasure. How DOES he do that? Simple. He started programming full-time in 1998, and in 2005 he figured out how to use WordPress to help pay the bills. In his spare time John spreads his demystify the web philosophy through community presentations and workshops. Want to catch John away from his computer? Good luck. Recent sightings have included early morning gym sessions, mountain bike trails with lots of jumps, and DJ lessons deep in the heart of the city that never sleeps. John likes to sleep, though, when he’s passing through his downtown Greensboro, NC, home.

John will present “Living with Our Computers (& Keeping it Healthy).”

Vanessa Fox

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was recently named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Look for her book Marketing in the Age of Google in early 2010.

Niall Kennedy

Niall Kennedy built his first website in 1993 after converting a HyperCard and LaserDisc presentation into HTML and video interchange formats. He co-organized the first WordCamp SF in 2006. Niall’s work has scurried down a crater on Mars, helped geeks find the cheapest Palm Pilot, indexed millions of bloggers minutes after publication, attempted to predict the financial future, re-imagined television, and connected the social web. He currently works as a consultant reinventing industries for the social web. Niall is the project lead for the VideoPress video hosting framework powering video sharing on WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, and an open source framework available under GPLv2.

Michael Koening

Michael joined the Automattic team as the Schmooze Engineer in 2008, where he works on IntenseDebate (a distributed comment system for blogs/websites) managing business development and customer support. Prior to joining Automattic, he was involved in a variety of technical enterprises, including an online music archive (iggli.com) and a real-time social search engine (OneRiot.com). Michael earned his BA in Philosophy from the University of Colorado, and currently lives in Chicago where he spends his free time playing bass guitar.

Michael will present a lighting session on Improving Your Comments with IntenseDebate.

Beau Lebens

Beau is a web developer who hails from Australia, but lives in San Francisco. He’s been working on the web since about 1996 and developing PHP/MySQL systems since 2000. He has been involved in a variety of technical enterprises ranging from an exclusively-online division at a University to a niche Search Engine Marketing firm, with a short stint building an online scrapbooking network for parents. Interested in all things social, tech and web-related, Beau holds a degree in online community, culture and governance, and spends most of his time these days hacking web apps for Automattic.

Dan Milward

Dan Milward is a new Zealand based entrepreneur with a love of open source technology and mobile games. Dan has particularly fond memories of his Commodore 64/128d. Dan is the Founder of Instinct, the company behind of the world famous WordPress e-Commerce Plugin powering many hundreds of thousands of sites including the ticketing on this one! Among the various e-Commerce related Plugins and WP communities that Instinct help foster, Dan’s company is in the process of building a WordPress social networking website where users get to create games for iPhone, Android and Flash Lite devices and then share them with their friends.

Raphael Mudge

Raphael, an Automattic Code Wrangler, is on a quest to help the web get its/it’s right. He develops After the Deadline, the powerful proofreading system you can use with Firefox, IntenseDebate, and WordPress. Besides checking grammar, Raphael keeps up the Sleep scripting language and the IRC client jIRCii. Raphael lives inn in Washington, DC.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt is the founding developer of WordPress, the open source blogging software that runs millions of sites around the world. In 2005, he started Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, bbPress, IntenseDebate, and BuddyPress. Matt lives in San Francisco and has a crush on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Scott Rosenberg

Scott is a cofounder of Salon.com and author of “Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters” (2009) and “Dreaming in Code” (2007). At Salon, Scott served as technology editor and later managing editor. He also started the Salon Blogs program in 2002, where he began his own blog, and conceived and prototyped the Open Salon blogging community.Today Scott works as founder and director of MediaBugs.org, a service for reporting errors in media coverage. He blogs at Wordyard.com and can be found on Twitter as @scottros.

Joseph Scott

Joseph is a California native, living in Utah with his wife and children. He got hooked on email when it meant dialing into a BBS with a 2400 baud modem and ended up memorizing way too much of the AT command set. Access to the Internet changed all that and going to work for an ISP cemented that shift. It also exposed to him to the world of open source, starting with FreeBSD in 1996. From there he spent a number of years in IT doing a little bit of everything. Joseph joined Automattic in 2007, where he focuses on WordPress APIs (XML-RPC/AtomPub), realtime-ish updates (rssCloud/PuSH), WordPress.org themes and stats, and likes to dabble in front and back end performance hacks.

Joseph will present “Writing Responsible Plugin & Theme Code.”

Stephan Spencer

Stephan Spencer is VP of SEO Strategies at Covario, an industry leader in paid and organic search software and services. Covario recently acquired Netconcepts, the company that Stephan founded in 1995. Stephan is the inventor of the automated pay-for-performance natural search technology platform GravityStream, now re-branded as Organic Search Optimizer, which powers the natural search channel for online retailers such as Cabela’s, Northern Tool, Campmor, and Woolrich. Stephan is an author of The Art of SEO, published in October 2009 by O’Reilly and co-authored by Eric Enge, Rand Fishkin and Jessie Stricchiola. He is a Senior Contributor to Practical Ecommerce and to MarketingProfs.com, a monthly columnist on Search Engine Land, and a regular contributor to Multichannel Merchant. He blogs primarily on his own blog – Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings, but his posts can also be found on Searchlight (part of the CNET Blog Network), Shop.org Blog, and a number of other blogs.

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

Richard will present “The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System.”

Rinat Tuhvatshin

Rinat is a co-founder and executive director of the WPMU-based Kloop.kg portal (in English kloop.info), the largest blog hosting platform in Kyrgyzstan (more than 1500 blogs) and one of the very few news services that dared to cover beginning of the recent revolt in the country. Right now Kloop.kg project is facing further expansion into one new city and two new countries. Rinat was educated as medical doctor, but after falling in love with WordPress devoted large chunk of his life to the Kloop project. He ejoys developing plugins for WorpdPress and WPMU, but still is a bit shy to offer them publicly, eventhough some of his code is successfully employed at kloop.kg.

Jane Wells

Jane is the user experience lead for WordPress, and has worked in the web industry for 10 years. She is often on the road, meeting WordPress users to incorporate their feedback into each new version. In between WordCamps, she tries to find time to restore her 1968 Austin-Healey Sprite. Jane is a former San Francisco resident. Her first computer was a Commodore Vic-20.

Jane will present “User Experience the WordPress Way.”