While most in the Twin Cities awoke to a snowy November day yesterday a hearty band of bloggers, programmers, designers, and assorted geeks braved the slippery, slushy roads for a day at camp…Word Camp. The first such event in the Twin Cities, the day was a resoundingly successful local presentation of the “everything WordPress” gatherings being staged throughout the country.
The first Wordcamp was put together in 2006 in San Francisco by Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of the open-source blogging software, WordPress. Since then, according to the Wordcamp Central site, over a hundred have taken place. Wordcamps have taken place or will take place from Austin to Jerusalem and Bangkok to Melbourne and by all accounts Minneapolis-St. Paul was a standout…at least to us.
The day began with brief yet sincere opening remarks from event organizers including local WordPress Users Group founder Toby Cryns, and designer Lauren Freeland as well as Matt Barker, Brandon Hedges and Jeff Martin. Special recognition was also given to a cast of interns (free help) for all of their efforts. It was the beginning of day of exceptional sessions and presentations (not to mention some pretty nice swag) that ranged from the the exceptionally technical and coder focused to the beginner and casual user levels, all in a well thought out track based schedule.
While the day was chocked full of great sessions by both local and national, let’s call them “Wordies”, I was particularly taken with presentations by Josh Byers on customizing WordPress (though I could have done without quite so much information about the Lord of the Rings) and a somewhat snow-shocked Vegas resident John Hawkins on building plug-ins. Even Minnov8’s own Steve Borsch and Tim Elliott gave a solid overview of WordPress for small business. And, though some of the sessions were a bit redundant or a tad too self-promotion oriented, the day exemplified the community surrounding “the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.” (WordPress’s words, not mine.)
No where was that community more on display than in the Technical Support room. This dedicated tribe of Wordie geeks spent the day selflessly addressing specific questions and fixing problems with sites for anyone who wanted to ask for their assistance. I didn’t even see a tip jar. The energy in that room was similar to the one experienced at the Overnight Web Challenge, a caffeine fueled 24 hour web development event that has gained serious geek cred in recent years.
Kudos to all who spent months organizing the event and to those who braved the snow, and sometimes questionable skills of Twin Cities drivers, to participate. As one who considers himself a WordPress tinkerer I look forward to next year. I can only imagine that the WordPress pros are already counting the days. Bravo!