Mark Jaquith Confirmed as Speaker

Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers of WordPress, has been confirmed as a speaker for WordCamp San Francisco. Mark will be involved in two sessions at Mission Bay:

Scaling, Servers, and Deploys — Oh My!
This talk will discuss professional WordPress development, scaling up and out to meet demand, and strategies for deploying everything that will keep you sane. Topics for discussion: Apache, Memcached, APC, nginx, NFS, rsync, Git, Capistrano.
This session will take place on Friday.

Security Showdown
This interactive session will feature 3-5 plugin security reviews (and tips to fix issues) by Mark Jaquith, Jon Cave, and Brad Williams in a contest format. Plugins that stump the chumps by containing no security issues will win a prize.
This session will take place on Saturday.

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Speaker Selection Almost Complete

Wow, did not expect to get more than 200 speaker proposals this year! While that slowed down the review precess a bit (about a week), I’ll start announcing speakers tomorrow. Once all the speakers are confirmed, I’ll post a schedule as well. In general, you can plan on each day running from 9-5, with registration opening at 8 and some kind of networking/happy hour at a location offsite (most likely conveniently located pub/bar) after the day has wrapped up programming.

Since there are clearly more people who feel they have something to contribute than we have hours in our 3 days at WCSF, we’ll also have some community-curated lightning talks. This will allow us to shine a spotlight on more of the great things happening in the WordPress community. I’d love to have breakout unconference sessions as well, but the venue configuration doesn’t lend itself as well to that, so in a couple of weeks check back for more info on how we’ll work the lightning session voting/selection.

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Ticket Sales Open!

Okay, WordCampers, ticket sales are open! Like every year, tickets include lunch and a limited edition event t-shirt. This year we’re doing something a little different — instead of everyone buying the same ticket, you can choose which days’ events you want to attend and buy a ticket just for those. This will help us with getting accurate headcounts, which we need for capacity and ordering food. Nothing makes me sadder than a sold-out multi-day WordCamp with empty seats on one of the days because people who only wanted to come one day had to buy a ticket for both.

This means there are a lot of options when choosing the ticket type you want, so you may want to remind yourself of the plans by checking out the program page. We’ll be adding more details there as we confirm speakers. Hey, we’re still accepting speaker applications!

Note: Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” keynote will be on Sunday at Mission Bay.

Prices are unbelievably low, as always. This year you can buy a single-day ticket for $25, a 2-day ticket for $40, or a 3-day pro pass for $50.

Keeping prices this low for the bulk of attendees means we need to raise a lot of dough to cover the event costs, so we also have a microsponsorship 3-day pass for $500. This ticket is intended for WordPress professionals or people who recognize that WordCamp SF is as valuable as more traditionally-priced industry conferences and want to help support the event. Microsponsors will get an extra-cool “contributor” name badge at the event and be listed by name in the microsponsors thank you section on the Sponsors page (coming soon).

If your company uses WordPress, builds with WordPress, or just plain loves WordPress, please consider becoming an event sponsor. Our generous supporters each year are the reason we are able to do so much for so many, and we couldn’t do it without them.

Okay, enough with the details, right? Go buy your tickets now!

 

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Calling All Sponsors

As the flagship/official annual WordCamp, we try to make the San Francisco event special. In San Francisco, special can cost a lot of money, which is why we depend on financial support from WordPress-based and related companies, local businesses, and even WordPress lovers who’ve done well for themselves to help cover the event costs and keep ticket prices as accessible as possible. This year, we’re putting together a program three times the size of last year, so we need to raise “beaucoup bucks,” as my granddad used to say (imagine in thick Brooklyn/Queens accent for full effect).

What’s different from last year’s sponsorships?

  • No swag bags. People already have bags, they don’t need another, and most people just throw away your lovingly crafted swag. It’s sad, but true. No more throwaways!
  • The $ levels extend higher than last year, since we have to cover three times the cost. We thought about offering individual day sponsorships, but decided simplicity was the better route. Levels range from $5,000 to $40,000.
  • Mini trade show! As the official WordPress annual conference, we decided to try a mini trade show this year. Supporters coming in at $10k and higher will be eligible to participate in the mini trade show portion of the event.
  • No specific ticket allotments. We’ll make sure sponsors have representation at the event. In the event a sponsor wants to bring a large group of additional attendees (a department of employees, etc), we’ll work out the details with them.

Your sponsorship will help pay for things like the venue rental, speaker travel, lunches and coffee, and commemorative t-shirts. So please — dig into your marketing budget, outreach allotment, or petty cash drawer and pony up to support the most anticipated WordCamp of the year. Check out the support levels and their associated benefits and get in touch to set up your sponsorship for WCSF 2011. Thanks!

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Call for Speakers!

The call for speakers has been posted! WordCamp SF brings together hundreds (I bet this will be the year we break 1,000) of WordPress users, developer, designers, and professionals for an insane weekend of networking, learning, and sharing the WP love. If you or someone you know has something to share that would make those hundreds of attendees sit up and think, “This. Is. Awesome,” then you (or the someone you know) should fill in the speaker application right away! We’ll take applications for two weeks, but the sooner you apply the better, so that if we need more information or ask you to revise your topic, you’ll have plenty of time before we make our final decisions.

Apply to be a speaker now!

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Three Days

Summer’s getting closer, and planning is starting to ramp up. We’ll be putting out calls for speakers and sponsors next week, but in the meantime, here’s the rough plan for WCSF weekend (subject to change). It’s basically three WordCamps in a row, and when we open ticket sales, you’ll be able to select tickets for specific days, or for the whole thing. In the past, we’ve tried to have something for everyone on one day, but the feedback we’ve received from attendees the past couple of years has shown us that people would like to have more content in their areas of interest. This format is an attempt to satisfy those requests, and should also make it possible for more people overall to attend.

Friday, August 12 – Professional Uses

The focus of this day will be large-scale, professional installations of WordPress. If you’re a using WordPress to power a professional publication, community site, application, academic network, large-scale business, government, or non-profit site, or another kind of site with similar requirements, this day is for you. Topics are likely to include scaling, multisite, BuddyPress, working with WordPress developers, security, transitioning to WordPress, case studies, and CMS-specific features. There will be sessions to appeal to a wide range of pros, including business leads, project managers, administrators, developers, sys admins, and content creators.

If there is interest, we may also try to arrange some type of activity to introduce publishers to firms and freelancers for hire, maybe something like a low-key mini-trade show or a speed dating style intro service. If this is something you think we should do, let us know in the comments.

Saturday, August 13 – Developers

Saturday’s focus is on the open source developer community that makes WordPress possible. We’ll run a core contributor training workshop for developers who would like to get involved but aren’t sure where to start or just want some guidance, and will have sessions on all kinds of development topics, including core code, plugins, themes (including some design sessions, hopefully), and APIs. This day is for the techies. Anyone who makes a living doing WordPress development — or would like to — should attend this day.

Saturday Friday, August 13 12 – First-Time Users

At a separate location on Saturday Friday, there will be a newbie workshop for people who have not yet started using WordPress, but would like to. The workshop will include setting up a live blog/site, then learning how to create content, change and edit themes, moderate comments, and understand how to use the features built into WordPress. At the end of the workshop, attendees will have a live site with a customized theme and starter content. Attending this workshop will also provide vocabulary and reference points that will make it easier for first-time users to get the most out of Sunday’s event.

Sunday, August 14 – Bloggers and Content Creators

With 40 million people using WordPress around the world, obviously bloggers and content creators are close to our hearts, and Sunday will be devoted to helping them get the most out of WordPress. We’ll have sessions to inspire, to inform, and to instruct. Tips for better writing, ideas for sprucing up your site, how-to sessions to help you get more out of WordPress (and themes and plugins), and connecting you with other WordPress users are just some of the ideas we have for sessions. What would you like to learn or see? Tell us in the comments!

Auxiliary events like parties will be announced closer to the event. A core developer summit is also being planned to take place right before WCSF, so many of the creators of WordPress will be in town for WordCamp.

We expect to open registration on June 1st.

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What should we have at WCSF 2011?

This year, WordCamp SF is going to be bigger than it’s ever been before, with three full days of content and additional activities. Help us plan the best event possible by giving us your input! What kind of content would you expect at the official annual WordPress conference? Who do you want to see? What would make this the most awesome WordCamp SF you could imagine? We’ll accept responses to the survey all weekend, so we have plenty to take into consideration on Monday when we start putting things together. Your input will be greatly appreciated — and if you know people who ought to attend WCSF this year, please give them the link to this post so they can weigh in, too!

This survey will remain open until 11:59pm Sunday night, San Francisco time.

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Venue and Dates Confirmed

WordCamp SF, the official annual conference of the WordPress open source project, will be held August 12-14, 2011. We’ll be returning to the Mission Bay Conference Center again, but this year we’ll be there for three days instead of one. The tentative plan is to arrange programming aimed at publishers on Friday, bloggers on Saturday and developers on Sunday (knowing there is overlap and some people will want to attend all three days). As we move forward, we’ll post here each week with an update. Note for anyone already opening their favorite travel-booking site: we’ll have a couple of days of pre- and post-WordCamp events, so while we definitely want you to save the date now, if you’re booking nonrefundable travel you may want to wait a little longer so you can consider the final schedule (including events such as contributor summit, design group meetup, WordCamp organizers brunch, etc).

For people who attended WordCamp SF last year who thought the annual event this year would be called WordCon, with WordCamp SF becoming a more locally-oriented event, you can read my long-winded explanation of why we didn’t go that route over the on the WordCamp Central blog.

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