WordCamp New York City 2009

The awesome speakers list wasn’t enough to convince you to attend WordCamp NYC? No problem: here’s the preliminary list of Saturday sessions, 59 of them and counting. There also are a handful still in the process of being determined, and these will be added to the list as soon as they are confirmed. Remember, with 8 tracks of content — Newbie, Blogger, CMS/App, Beginner Dev, Advanced Dev, BuddyPress/MU, Academic, Open Source Community — there’s something for everyone.

Right now the list is mostly just a list, but descriptions of each session will be added as the speakers write them.

We’ll create a place to discuss potential unconference sessions (to fill in the programming gaps) here on the site a little closer to the event.

What session are you most excited to see? Post in the comments!

*Yes, I know I shouldn’t have ended the title with a preposition, but that what I wanted to say.

The moment you’ve all been waiting for: the speakers list is up! There are a few people we’re still talking to, so there will be a few additions over the next couple of days, but the bulk of our WordCamp NYC speakers are listed. Behold the magnificence that it possibly the biggest speaker list of any WordCamp ever! Close to 50 knowledgeable WordPress users, designers and developers from near and far have signed up to share their experience with you.

Now if that doesn’t get you off your butt to go register, I don’t know what will. Go buy a ticket!

And seriously, with a fantastic lineup like this, don’t you want to become a sponsor?

Coming from out of town to attend WordCamp NYC but appalled by the price of New York hotels? We can’t lie to to you, NYC is expensive. Like really expensive. (Related: still looking for sponsors — good karma!)

For those of you that need to rent a place to lay your head, we’re happy to announce that the Gershwin Hotel has extended us a 15% discount off their regular rate for the superior queen room. The Gershwin is a very cool, artsy, historic hotel in the neighborhood of the venue (walking distance), and the discount drops the rate to $210 per night (I know, I know, but that’s cheap for NYC!). If you would like to take advantage of the discount, simply use the coupon code “CAMP” when you make your reservation. NOTE: You must reserve by phone: 212-545-8000. Online reservations will not incorporate the discount. They have a couple dozen rooms available right now, so I’d suggest acting fast if you want to grab one of them.

If that’s still too rich for your blood, I’d like to suggest something most people don’t think of when they think of NYC hotels: hostels. There are a lot of great, really really cheap hostels in the city, and you can lay your head somewhere for significantly less cash. I just did a search for hostel rooms in NYC from Nov 13-16 and found dozens of hostels with availability, and rates as low as $20 per night for shared dorms and $40 per night for private rooms. When choosing a hostel, try to get something near the subway… the venue is closest to the 4-5-6 line, but is easily walkable from Union Square, where most lines stop.

I know there are also people for whom even $20/night is too much since they’re already paying for travel, and would be happy just borrowing a couch. We can’t really do much for those people without entering a liability nightmare, but as savvy bloggers who recognize the connection-building power of blog comments, you can figure out how to connect with each other. Oh look, comments for this post are open!

Yes, it’s true… registration is finally open for WordCampNYC!

New York City’s WordCamp is going to be two full days of WordPress-related sessions, announcements and fun.  Here’s a very quick overview of what we have in store for you.  More details will be announced daily, so sign up for email updates or follow us on Twitter.

We’re selling two types of tickets to the event to cover all the bases.

NOV 14, SATURDAY: A full day of presentations, workshops and demos related to WordPress.  There will be up to eight (8) tracks running at once (including unconference sessions), so you can choose which you want to attend. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, a blogger or a developer, we’ll have something for you.  This is only for FULL PASS holders.

NOV 15, SUNDAY: In the morning, FULL PASS holders will continue the tracks from Saturday, then break for lunch around noon. After lunch, both FULL PASS and MINI PASS holders will go to Mason Hall Auditorium for an afternoon of mini-presentations, major announcements, demos and a Q&A with Matt Mullenweg.

As mentioned above there are two flavors of tickets:

1. Full Pass: This Ticket entitles the holder to entry for all sessions on Saturday and Sunday, including Mason Hall.  You’ll also get a T-shirt, and lunch on Saturday.
2. Mini Pass: So you love WordPress but you can’t commit to a full weekend.  Why not buy a Mini Pass?  This Ticket entitles you ONLY to entry for Sunday sessions in Mason Hall beginning at 1:30pm.   These sessions will include major announcements and a Q&A with Matt Mullenweg.  We’ll give you a T-shirt as well, but you should eat before you come.

Still not convinced? Here are the tracks we’ll be running:

• Newbie – Bring your laptop and we’ll get you a WordPress blog set up before lunch on Saturday.
• Blogger – Learn about cool WP features you might be missing, plugins, themes, creating content, etc.
• CMS User – Get to know the plugins and themes and strategies that make it easy to run a large-scale non-blog web site using WordPress. Case studies galore.
• Beginning Developer – Know HTML/CSS/JavaScript and ready to take the plunge into WP development? Learn how to write your first plugin, customize themes, contribute to core, etc.
• Advanced Developer – Sessions will be dedicated to more in-depth topics like plugin unit testing, security issues, etc.
• Education – Academic users will discuss issues unique to using WP in academic environments (like CUNY!)
• BuddyPress/MU – Looking for a new challenge? BuddyPress is the new black.
• Hacker Room – Just want to code? A special room will be set up just for people to work on core patches for bugs to version 2.9. Trusted core developers will be on hand to provide guidance as needed.

And, on Sunday…..

• Project WordCamp – Theme and plugin competition judging by a panel of WordPress luminaries.
• Ignite Sessions – Get a “Best of WordCamp NYC” experience with some of the more popular presenters from Saturday doing abbreviated versions (5 minutes, 20 slides) of their earlier talks.
• Q & A with Matt Mullenweg – Co-founder and project lead of WordPress will talk about the vision for WordPress moving forward and take questions from the audience.

So what are you waiting for?!?  Go buy your ticket! (Except you, speakers! Wait until we send you special registration code next week! Repeat! Speakers: DO NOT REGISTER HERE.)

Oh, wait! We almost forgot. Bringing all this together is crazy expensive. If WordPress helps you do your job, forms part of your business, or just plain makes you super happy every day, please consider becoming an individual ($250) or consultant ($500) sponsor. These tickets will get you full pass access and goodies, plus a little publicity and public thanks.

If you have a small business, agency, or larger company and would be able to sponsor on a higher level, please visit our Sponsors page for more info before you register, as sponsors at these levels will be registered separately.

As the promised land of canonical plugins draws near, when WordPress plugins maintained by development teams rather than single developers working solo will hopefully become the norm*, we thought it would be fun to encourage people to think about working in development teams with a friendly competition. There will be two: one for themes, one for plugins. Time is short, so if you’re interested, read fast and start coding!

The Rules:
Each submission must have 2 or more contributors. At least one of these contributors needs to be a New York Metro resident, and present at WordCamp NYC on Sunday, November 15.

Submissions must be repo-ready. That is, they should be able to be submitted to the WordPress.org theme or plugin repositories and be accepted: no spam, no security holes, no duping an existing theme or plugin.

Submissions must be new creations, not yet released to the public. You can use something you’ve been working on as a starting point, but remember that you *must* have collaborators to enter the competition.

Plugins can do pretty much anything, but must be GPL and must be free (as in beer), and not be simply a giveaway to upsell add-ons that are not free and/or GPL.

Ditto themes. You can do a basic theme, you can do a framework, you can do something specific and functional like P2, whatever, but it needs to be original to get into the top 3. Just changing a few colors or shifting the layout of an existing theme will not suffice for the sake of this competition. You may submit WordPress *or* BuddyPress themes.

The Deadline:
Submissions must be completed by 11:59pm (NYC time) on November 7, 2009. Leave a comment on this post and point to where the judges can download the code for evaluation. In your comment, feel free to provide the “elevator pitch” for your submission, describing what makes it special, etc. Identify in the comment who is on your team (link to names), who is in NYC, and who will be attending WordCamp NYC. This will give the judges enough time to evaluate entries. Late entries will not be accepted.

The Judging:
Matt Mullenweg and other trusted WordPress-universe personalities will be evaluating submissions for code competency, user experience, and style. The top 3 plugin submissions and the top 3 theme submissions will be invited to face off at WordCamp NYC’s Sunday session, which will be held in a 1000-person auditorium. That’s a lot of potential users, employers, clients, and collaborators.

Each team will have a few minutes to introduce their submissions, and then the judges will let you know what they liked and disliked about your entry, after which teams will have a chance to respond (think Project Runway for open source software). After all teams have been evaluated, the judges will announce a winning theme and a winning plugin. These winners will be congratulated (and their winning submissions promoted) on the official WordPress Development blog at http://wordpress.org/development, which reaches millions of people, once the submissions have been uploaded to the WordPress.org repositories.

Start your engines and get coding!

*If you don’t know why canonical plugins = promised land, you should probably attend WordCamp NYC to find out!

This year’s WordCamp in New York City is positioned to be one of the largest WordCamp’s ever. With the local, national and international WordPress communities planning to attend WordCampNYC, we realized we needed a larger venue.

Today, we are very pleased to announce that Baruch College of the City University of New York will be the new venue for WordCampNYC, and will be donating a significant amount of classrooms, as well as their Mason Hall Auditorium, to our event. This generous venue sponsorship from Baruch enables us to cater to a wider range of WordPress users by allowing us to simultaneously hold multiple tracks and cover all topics WordPress.

Blogs@Baruch, a program overseen by the College’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, is the largest WordPress project at CUNY. It is built on WordPress MU and enables members of the Baruch academic community to create individual, group or course blogs in just a few clicks. Baruch College is an advocate of WordPress and other open-source technology, making it a perfect fit for WordCampNYC.

Now that our venue is solidified, we can start selling some tickets! Look for registration to open this week.

Thank you for your patience… it will be worth it.

Apologies for the radio silence.

Now a quick update…

We’re still figuring out the schedule, and working out the venue spaces… which makes it a bit difficult to come up with maximum attendees (and ticket quantities).  This should be worked out shortly.

Tickets should be on sale in a week or two, and will be announced on this website, and Twitter.  Make sure you sign up for email updates.

Thank you for your patience.  It will be worth it!

The results are in! After a week of voting, the WordCampNYC logo contest has closed its polls, and the winners are…

#13 - Jason

#14 - Andrew dela Serna

#15 - Dan Simmonds

#18 - Krista Gonzalez

Though logo #2 received 129 votes, submissions using the NYC subway motif (logos #13,14,15,18) had a combined total of 163 votes.  The fact that multiple contestants chose to use that motif combined with the high number of votes for these entries (not to mention that they’re just plain cool) has convinced us that the subway signs are the way to go. The legibility of text, good use of professional-looking graphics, and ability to be print well at both small and large sizes all were taken into account when making this decision. Because they so clearly represent day-to-day New York City, all four subway entries will be used to brand the event, providing our WordCamp with a great look and more designers with exposure. We’ll be putting up a page soon with blog badges using these graphics for you to publicize WordCampNYC.

We’d like to thank the WordCampNYC community for participating in the voting, and we especially congratulate all those designers who captured NYC’s spirit in their submissions.  We’ll put up a page soon with badges using these graphics for you to publicize WordCampNYC on your blog.

The long awaited WordCampNYC logo contest designs have been submitted.  We received some amazing submissions and appreciate all the time and effort put into creating these logos. Now it’s your opportunity to let your voice be heard!

Vote for your favorite logo by September 7 , 5pm EST.

We recently posted a survey asking potential WordCamp NYC attendees what kind of conference ours should be: what general tracks would be interesting, what specific topics would be awesome (or boring), and what the make-up of the audience would likely be. It’s open until August 31st, since we’ll start making official schedule announcements September 1st, but we’ve got about 130 responses so far, so I thought we’d share the results and what they mean for the WordCamp NYC program.

Audience Make-up
I’m glad to see ours will be a developer-heavy event, rather than what I think of as a “WordCamp Lite” (WC Lites are aimed solely at bloggers hoping to improve their search rankings so they can make more money from Google AdSense, not that there’s anything wrong with that.). The breakdown:

23% Consultant using WordPress for clients
21% Personal Blogger
11% Work for a Media Company using WordPress
10% Other (ad-hoc answers for this question were an even split among the existing categories)
8% Designer
5% Academic User (professor, student)
4% Theme Developer
4% Corporate Blogger
4% Plugin Developer
3% WordPress Core Developer
2% Photo/Video Blogger

Tracks
We proposed 7 potential tracks and asked which ones you would be interested in attending, as well as which one you would attend if you had to pick one. When forced to choose, the numbers look like this:

27% Developer
20% Use as a large-scale CMS
19% Business
18% Blogger
7% Newbies only
5% Academic use
5% Systems/security

These ratios mean we will plan a very developer-friendly program, and will try to get lots of demos around practical usage for bloggers, as opposed to the more generic “How to get more comments” type of talks that I see at so many conferences. Maybe small tracks with limited enrollment would be a good idea for newbies and other smaller constituencies.

Days
I love two-day WordCamps. I love them because you have more time to talk to people and get to know the local community face to face, you can participate in more sessions, and it’s not as tiring as attending one very long day that leaves you exhausted for the last couple of hours. That said, I’ve been to a number of 2-day WCs, and I’m always disappointed when I overhear people saying they aren’t coming to the second day because they just wanted to see Matt speak (btw: lame! engage your local community!), have laundry to do, or whatever. Why? Because in addition to missing half the experience, you’ve effectively denied it to someone else, as well. Many WordCamps sell out quickly, have long waitlists, and have to turn away hundreds of would-be attendees. Because of this, we asked if you would attend both days. The results:

50% Only if I was interested in speakers/topics on both days.
48% Of course! The more WordCamp, the better.
2% I would only attend one day.

I would hate to turn away as many people as I’m expecting we’ll have to, just to find out come Sunday that we could have let in another 50 people after all. So, we’re going to try to do some of the smaller tracks with single-day scheduling, so you’ll have the option of registering for one or both days.

Session Types
As Mark Jaquith pointed out recently, most WordCamps aren’t really unconferences, they’re planned conference programs that are just a little more casual than your standard fare. I personally enjoy the WordCamps that have some scheduled sessions *and* some unconference time built in for ad-hoc collaboration and discussion. We asked you what kind of sessions you would prefer. You said:

37% Small workshops
34% Visiting speakers from the broader WordPress universe
13% Short demos of plugins/themes/sites
6% Local NYC speakers giving presentations
5% Ad-hoc unconference sessions and discussions
5% Other

I’m not sure why there was so little interest in local speakers and unconference sessions… maybe you felt like you could get that at the local meetup? In any case, we will put together a proposed program that mixes a variety of programming types.

Session Content
There was a matrix-type question that asked you to rate potential topics based on your interest in them. The results of this type of question are kind of a pain to type out, so if you’re interested in the vote-by-vote details, check out this chart. If you just want a high-level recap, here are the three most popular topics, based on the percentage of respondents who said they’d wait in line to see sessions about them:

50.8% Theme creation/editing
47.7% Making money with WordPress
46.9% Site demos (how to make this using WordPress)

Of course, we’ll have sessions about all kinds of things.

So, that’s about it. The survey will remain open until August 31st (as previously announced) should you decide to weigh in. The next vote you see here will be for our event logo, which is coming up in a few days.