It’s Time To Propose Lightning Sessions!

Although most of WordCamp San Francisco will hum along smoothly, like a well-oiled machine, we’ve left a few blocks of time for scheduled surprises: Lightning Sessions. Following lunch on Friday and Sunday we have 30 minute time blocks (one for each track) designed to let you — seriously, it could be you! — share as much quick, fun, interesting information with us as possible. Are you working on an exciting WordPress project? Are you trying to solve a particularly tough problem? Do you have a plugin to demo that everyone should be using? Lightning sessions are where you need to be.

We’re planning to have 5-6 lightning sessions for each block, and they will correspond to the theme of each track — each track will have its own lightning session, so there will be two at a time. We need your proposals for these categories and days:

Friday: Professionals, less-technical
Friday: Developers, more-technical
Sunday: Information and inspiration for content creators
Sunday: Tips & tricks for getting the most out of WordPress

Before you tell us your idea, there are a few rules to keep in mind. First, you have to actually be at WordCamp or at least be able to mentally control someone who is, otherwise it’s going to be difficult for your presentation to actually happen. This means that you need to already have a ticket to the event. Second, you need to be on site in the morning when we vote for sessions. Voting will take place on Friday and Sunday in the morning for that day’s lightning sessions and if you’re not on site we won’t be able to choose your session, sorry. Finally, lightning sessions will be 5 minutes long — that means you have to go quick. You can use a web browser on a computer we’ll provide, but to move things along you won’t be able to use your own laptop, slides, other files, etc. If you want to show something on screen, make sure it’s publicly available on the web.

Sound good? Good! We want your proposals. For those of you that are interested in speaking at WordCamps, this is a great way to get your feet wet without a full-scale talk. Please leave a comment on this post with your proposed lightning sessions and let us know what you’d like to share at WordCamp SF. Include a title and description as well as any information that will help people decide if they think it would be interesting.

 

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12 Responses to “It’s Time To Propose Lightning Sessions!

  1. Douglas Bell says:

    Just throwing this out there, but I’ve had some experience using WordPress Multi-Site for developing websites for large organizations that have multiple “departments,” so to speak, that are related but distinct, and working on unifying them through the interface and backend WordPress APIs.

    5 minutes isn’t a lot of time to say much, but I’d be willing to give a short presentation either on some things I’ve learned in trying to develop Multi-Site into a unified site, or I could talk a bit about how student organizations at my university are using WordPress to connect with students.

  2. George Ortiz says:

    With so many people on the same WordPress platform,we can easily aggregate and push information across those sites in a variety of contexts. One instance I’m working on at Storefront Themes is the ability to see trends across WordPress powered stores and how your site compares. The same idea can be used for blogs so that you could see trends in how people read and comment on posts, photos, etc. I would love to share our work and ideas with fellow WordCamp attendees in a lightning session!

  3. Friday: Professionals, less-technical
    Sunday: Information and inspiration for content creators

    Pressing words, pressed by words? Words may quite possibly be the most powerful force in our lives! They’re essential like the air we breathe, and it is unimaginable what life would be like without them. However, many struggle to survive while lacking basic literacy skills.

    We invite the WordCamp community to join our nonprofit program, LearnThatWord, as we create version 2.0 of the smartest, most interactive, and personalized vocabulary program in the world. Because everything is designed around the needs of the individual, LearnThatWord works well for people of all ages and skill levels, from the struggling learner to the advanced word whiz.

    We are looking for volunteers to help us refine our new, usage-focused Online Dictionary of English (ODE),and make it media-rich, complete with video, images, pronunciations from different countries and lots of usage samples with audio.

    It would also be great to meet bloggers who have ideas and feedback, are interested in updates, or can donate/sponsor to help us make the new version of LearnThatWord freely available.

  4. I’d love to speak on what we’re working on with Edit Flow. It’s a WordPress plugin that aims to solve many of the communication and workflow problems of multi-author sites. In 5 minutes I’d be able to touch on most of the core features: things like editorial comments, custom metadata, email notifications, and user groups.

  5. Currently in order to enjoy the App store platform exposure (with over its 200M iOS users) you need to develop a custom iphone App using Objective C technologies.

    We will be happy to demonstrate to Wordcamp attendants how any WordPress user can create and customize his own native iphone app and publish it to the Appstore by using a WordPress plugin with a friendly wizard and without dealing with any development and/or coding.

  6. Joe Boydston says:

    WordPress is saving journalism. 

    Newspapers are disrupting the local media business by innovating on top of WordPress. I’ll demo and discuss plugins that redefine how a newspaper is run, including a sustainable  business model that includes both legacy print publications as well as digital. All powered by WordPress of course. 

  7. I’ve got one for using WordPress as a People Manager beyond the standard users table.

  8. Gal Brill says:

    http://techcrunch.com/:
    “If you’re a blog or forum owner, engagement is always on your mind. There’s only so much you can do, though, to pull your audience back in to read new content, right? Well, what if you could send a push notification to users when new content is posted? It’s this feature exactly that sits in the center of new Israeli upstart UppSite‘s offering.”

    Take your WordPress to the next level in lightning speed…
    Love to show all of you how you can get your content to the iOS and Android Market in under 5 min!

  9. I would love to talk about how WordPress can be used to serve mobile apps.
    At this moment I am working on two projects which are both app only. The frontend basically shows information about what the app does.

    – One of them is a multisite installation where every site would meen a new app.
    – The other one is a cool project where the customer can fill in locations through the WordPress backend and the iPhone app will use this.

    I am still working on this projects and there is still some things to do but I would love to show how to let users experience a easy way to insert and where it will leed to.

  10. Calin Don says:

    Friday: Developers

    A plugin work in progress to allow dispalying most viewed posts using data from Google Analytics and behaving nicely on high traffic.

  11. mitcho says:

    If it’s possible to present a dev-ish lightning talk on Sunday, I would like to propose a quick show and tell “this is something we built between sessions in the past couple days.”

    I have something to show, and I also have Pete Mall, Andy Nacin, and Alex Russell on board. We can (probably) pack in the four little show-and-tells in five minutes.