WordCamp US, the First Recap

As I catch up on all things WCUS, we will start with this one and move into some recaps. For myself, and Do the Woo, this was an interesting WordCamp simply because of the timing and a surprise for me. Of course, what fell into the “how was my own experience” was the joy of seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Between the hallway track, the after-parties and random gatherings of meals and drinks, well, it gave me my fill of what any successful WordCamp typically brings me. With it came an exhaustion that I have not experienced in past WordCamps, and it’s hard to say why.

Now I have a few audio snippets I want to share with you from some attendees in this show, but first let me tell you what made this WordCamp US unique to me.

My highlights

First, the venue. For those of us who have spent a business lifetime going to conferences, you likely, as I have, experienced a conference center that is holding several conferences at once. Las Vegas comes to mind for me. It’s a bit different even for flagship WordCamps, as you are mingling amongst other conference attendees. When you check out the bar, it isn’t filled with WordPressers. And the layout can be a bit unusually spread out, as this one was with the placement of session rooms and what they call the “expo hall”. Anyway, that was what is was.

Secondly, the vibe and feel of the conference, for me, was a bit different. And I cannot place my finger on what that was. One thing that really stood out was the number of people I saw there who I had not seen for quite awhile, pre-COVID and earlier. It was like some kind of family reunion. They came out of the woodwork. This made for a lot of people to connect with and rekindle in-person relationships. Maybe that was part of my exhaustion.

Lastly, for me, I feel into the opportunity of having a small booth for Do the Woo. Or I should say a table. I think I will save that story for another episode, but let me just say thanks to Anil Gupta, from Multicollab and the Dot Store, Do the Woo was able to get even more exposure at the camp. You will hear the entire story later as Anil joins us as a new sponsor.

What was your highlight at WordCamp US?

Well, enough of that. Or should I say enough of me. Let’s listen in as we hear from some WordCampers their highlight of attending WordCamp this year.

Hey, everyone. This is Anil Gupta. I’m a CEO and co founder of Multidots, Multicollab, and DotStore. I’m here at WordCamp US 2023 in Maryland and this is most likely my 10th or 15th WordCamp in last 10 years. One reason why I keep coming back to WordCamp U. S. is that I really like the WordPress community and the people here are so nice, warm, and welcoming. My first WordCamp was 2014 WordCamp San Francisco. I don’t think they were naming WordCamp US at that time. It was still considered as the city-based WordCamp. So it was called WordCamp San Francisco. And that was my first time being in a WordCamp and being close to the WordPress community, and meeting a lot of nice, kind, and helpful people in the WordPress community. So I think that was my first interaction and experience and I really enjoyed it. I really liked how they were so welcoming and helpful.

Since then I have been keep coming back to the WordCamp, every time I can and really enjoyed the random conversation and specifically all the different people that I admire, I get inspired from meeting them in person, having a one on one chat and a lot of inspiration and just learning.  And knowing what others do in the WordPress community, how they approach the same problem as an entrepreneur, as a WordPress expert, as a product owner. There’s so much learning in there, and so much inspirations there. I would say I come here to learn, grow, and get inspired from the WordPress community.

I’m Oliver St. George with Avalara. I’m on the partner marketing team. What I’ve enjoyed most about WordCamp US this year is spending time with a lot of my partners, whether it’s WooCommerce, Pagely, or GoDaddy, spending time with the people there, meeting new people at those companies and just further learning more about the WordPress community. It’s been a great event. Can’t wait for next year.

I am Frederick Coleman and I’m at Blockonomics Bitcoin payment processor for WordPress. We were right next to Bob here at the WordCamp US. Might have been encroaching a bit with our sign, but yeah, I wanted to talk about what I love about WordCamps. Because, WordCamps are such an amazing place for collaboration and for being able to meet new people all over the place and being able to exchange ideas. W have sponsored a handful of WordCamps now over the past couple of years and the reason why we do it is because of all those reasons that I mentioned, being able to talk to people, I’ve talked to so many different people here.

And talked about Bitcoin, talked about how to integrate things with WordPress, talked about different plugins, and all kinds of stuff. And it’s really about that community aspect that really drives me to enjoy WordCamps and to continue wanting to come and be able to be a part of that community.  Even if it’s only a small part, b help to facilitate those discussions between all kinds of different people. So I love it and I will definitely continue to keep on coming back to WordCamps. Really enjoyed WordCamp US this year and looking forward to all the future ones where all the collaboration can happen.

Hi, I’m Vicki Morton with Six Foot Three. I’m really enjoying being here at WordCamp US 2023. A great way to network and meet new people in the industry. We’re having a great time.

Susana. I’m from Portugal. I’m with PluginsLab. I’m really enjoying meeting new people.

My name is Nils Fredrik from the agency of Norway called Moximer, or Moximer as we say in Norwegian. I enjoy WorldCamps because I come here to meet the other Woo Expert agencies of the world. I tend to go to WorldCamp Asia, WorldCamp Europe, and WorldCamp US. I meet some of the same people everywhere, and I meet new people every time I go a new place.

Hey, this is William Jackson from Jacksonville, Florida. It is great to be here at WordCamp US 2023. My brand is MyQuest2Teach and my wife Aida is a speaker. We are here to learn how we can use the plugins and products and services as teachers here and across the nation and around the world to teach youth, teens and young adults how to use WordPress to be entrepreneurs and business owners. So this is a great opportunity to expand our brands to get educational content and resources to provide services to different communities that we work with globally.

I always love hearing what people love about any given WordCamp. And if I had known I was getting a sponsor booth, I would have had more of these snippets. But don’t go away. I have three short WordPress origin stories from attendees to share as I asked them “How did you get started in WordPress?”

The WordPress origin story

My name is Paola Gonzalez. I am a content specialist at Equalize Digital. We work in WordPress accessibility. I started using WordPress back when I was in college. Right before graduating, I actually took a WordPress class. That was back in 2019, and I’ve been using WordPress ever since then. And as a content creator, I have found it extremely helpful because I don’t have to know code. I can just drag in blocks. And it works great, and that has been my journey doing WordPress.

This is Jay from Automattic at WooCommerce and let’s see, my WordPress story is connected to my first real job working in the tech space at Wikipedia, at the Wikimedia Foundation, and we needed to to build a blog. And WordPress was the obvious choice because we’re an open source organization and we wanted to to support the community. So we installed a blog and very quickly learned how to run it and make it secure. But then we realized we needed to have a blog that could scale and needed to reach millions of people very quickly. So we ended up working with Automattic and the WordPress VIP team to really explode that blog.

But I remember it was so exciting when we first set up the blog, had the dashboard, and it completely changed the way we did our work from a communication standpoint. We would give people accounts to edit to, to read, and everybody learned how to blog. And we went from one day where we didn’t blog to a future where all we did was blog and that became our major instrument.  To this day, I feel if you run a nonprofit, and you don’t use WordPress, you’re crazy. You have to have that power to be really incredible communicators. Long live WordPress.

I am Tiffany Bridge, I’m the product manager for Managed Applications at Nexcess. I got started in WordPress because I had a personal blog on Moveable Type. I was teaching myself how to build websites using Blogger and Moveable Type and things like that. And then Moveable Type changed their licensing back in 2004 and people were talking about this new thing, WordPress, that people were jumping to instead.  So I learned to install WordPress. And I learned to blog on WordPress, and then I started learning how to customize WordPress. And I have been using WordPress ever since, and now I work in WordPress.

Can you imagine how many of these stories are out there? I know that in our shows more times than not we often hear how others got into WordPress and WooCommerce. It’s always great to hear those stories, and often, as individuals we can find some that we relate to ourselves.