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What to expect as a volunteer at WordCamp for Publishers

Like all WordCamps, sponsors and volunteers are critical to making WordCamp for Publishers an affordable community event. The real cost of each attendee can be hundreds of dollars, but thanks to your support, we are able to offer tickets for just $40.

The volunteer survey is open through July.

Here’s a short list of some roles volunteers will fill:

  • They will serve at the registration table, welcoming attendees as they arrive.
  • They will distribute t-shirts and swag to attendees.
  • They will serve as room managers, guards and runners, helping keep the speaker tracks on schedule.
  • They will serve in the Happiness Bar, providing tech support to attendees.
  • They will welcome attendees to other conference events like the brewery tour and baseball game and help everyone have a good time.
  • Generally help ensure the event is a positive experience that embraces the code of conduct.

Thanks to the layout of the facility, you’ll never be far from the action, and volunteer assignments tend to be on the shorter side (typically a single 2-3 hour shift). Prior to the event, we will be sharing additional information  about shifts, responsibilities, and other logistics with volunteers in a private channel on Slack.

Ticket sales for WordCamp for Publishers are still open. Volunteers may be eligible for a free or discounted ticket; contact us via email with ‘Volunteers’ in the subject line after you’ve filled out the survey.

VOLUNTEER SURVEY

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The other WordCamp in Denver…

If you reside in Denver or if you’re lucky enough to be able to stay for awhile, you’ll have the opportunity to attend two WordCamps being hosted in the city in August. Our friends over at WordCamp Denver talk about the differences between the two events:

If you manage a publication, you should go to WordCamp for Publishers. Then if you’re still in town, we’d love to have you at WordCamp Denver! Don’t manage a publication but still use WordPress? Come to WordCamp Denver!

Check out the full post on the WordCamp Denver website.

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WordCamp for Publishers events schedule is live!

We’re pleased to announce that the event schedule has been finalized. Be sure to check it out so you don’t miss your favorite talks, demos,  or activities! Note that registration begins early on August 17th and that there’s a post conference outing each day.

Also, today is the last day to buy tickets and be guaranteed swag and a spot at events. We hope to see you all in Denver for this amazing lineup!

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Buy Your Tickets by July 14th for a Guaranteed Spot!

There are around 50 tickets remaining for WordCamp for Publishers. As a small, first-year conference, we have to be careful about how we budget our space, food, and money. We are in the process of our final preparations for the event and we have to start making some assumptions about our final attendee total to ensure everyone has the best experience possible.

We will have tickets on sale right up until August 17th, but if you want to be guaranteed to be included in meals, swag, and events (brewery tour, baseball game, after-party), please register no later than July 14th. That’s when we’ll be finalizing our orders with vendors and venues.

We hope to see you all in Denver!

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Announcing WordCamp for Publishers Speakers: Part 4

We’re very excited to continue to announce our speakers and sessions for the inaugural WordCamp for Publishers. This is the last of four posts introducing our full lineup.

They will be sharing insights and perspectives that span many different roles within the publishing industry. We hope you’ll join them in Denver to hear what they have to offer!

Also don’t forget that applications for travel scholarships close today Friday, 7/7.

Owen Stowe

Owen is the director of UX Development at Alley Interactive, a web agency for large-scale digital publishers. Owen works closely with both Alley’s back-end developer and design teams to help deliver in-browser designs and facilitate a seamless design-to-development process. He has led the front-end team on some of Alley’s largest projects, including the Brookings Institution and the Denver Post. Owen has experience in design, prototyping, style guides, and building custom front-ends for large-scale sites and site networks

Prototyping in the Browser with WordPress

Pattie Reaves

Pattie Reaves is a senior user experience developer at Alley Interactive, a web agency for large-scale digital publishers. At Alley, Pattie has worked on teams to build websites for Digital First Media, America’s Test Kitchen’s Cook’s Science, and The Points Guy. Prior to Alley, Pattie worked in editorial and new media at the Bangor Daily News and Sun Media Group in Maine.

Prototyping in the Browser with WordPress

Rebekah Monson

Rebekah Monson is co-founder and VP of Product and Editorial for WhereBy.Us, a local media startup that connects people to their cities through storytelling and experiences. Its publications, Miami’s The New Tropic and Seattle’s The Evergrey, produce email newsletters, original storytelling, merchandise and events that reach more than a million curious locals each year. WhereBy.Us became profitable in its first year and is currently expanding its tech offerings and scaling to new markets.

Rebekah also co-founded Code for Miami and Hacks/Hackers Miami. She serves on the board of the Society for News Design and on Miami-Dade County’s Millennial Task Force and actively supports many initiatives to improve diversity in journalism and technology. She frequently speaks and consults about working at the intersection of technology, storytelling and civic engagement for journalism and technology companies, governments and nonprofits.

Why We Ditched WYSIWYG and Built Our Newsletter Tools in WordPress

Tessa Kriesel

Agency and Community Engineer at Pantheon, Tessa has been a web developer for over 10 years. She enjoys front-end development but also loves to build sites from start to finish using WordPress or other open-source PHP CMSes. She started in Joomla back when it was 1.0.x and worked her way into WordPress about 7 years ago. She enjoys teaching others to code as well as speaking at conferences and youth events. Tessa is a northern Minnesota native, but now lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and four children – three boys and a baby girl. She loves dogs and enjoys helping local organizations rescue dogs in her free time.

Continuous BlahBlahBlah. Basics of Continuous Integration & Deployment

Whitney Yadrich

Whitney has been working in online content management since 2005. After taking a course in multimedia journalism at her alma mater, the University of Kansas, she caught a fever. The only prescription was more Internet.

She spent the next six years working for news organizations in northeast Kansas and the Kansas City metropolitan area, covering a wide spectrum of topics including sports, art, government, politics, crime and weather, with a focus on community management and engagement.

During her journalism career, she was honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Radio and Television Digital News Association (RTNDA Murrow Awards) and a 2008 Emmy Nomination from the Mid-America Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

In 2011, Whitney left journalism and found her groove as a software project manager. She has managed dozens of projects from ideation to completion on a variety of platforms, but WordPress has always been her one true love. Its flexibility and ease in managing and publishing content aligns with her passion for organization and good storytelling.

Outside of work, you’ll find Whitney playing outside, planning a travel adventure or engrossed in interior design projects. Mildred and Lita are her home office assistants, and they are both very good dogs.

The Project Scope Will Change. Here’s How You Make It a Tolerable – If Even Pleasant – Experience.

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Announcing WordCamp for Publishers Speakers: Part 3

We’re very excited to continue to announce our speakers and sessions for the inaugural WordCamp for Publishers. This is the third of four posts introducing our full lineup.

They will be sharing insights and perspectives that span many different roles within the publishing industry. We hope you’ll join them in Denver to hear what they have to offer!

Also don’t forget that applications for travel scholarships close this Friday, 7/7.

John Gamboa

John is a Technical Success Manager in the Customer Experience team at WP Engine. He spent the better part of four years living in South Korea and China, where he worked as a technical editor, writer and web developer before returning to the U.S. and moving to Austin, TX.

Navigating the Censored Web

Julia Smith

Julia is the Director of INN Labs, the product and technology arm of the Institute for Nonprofit News. She leads a team of news technologists to develop software that supports and advances the work of nonprofit publishers. Julia came to INN from the Center for Investigative Reporting where she was a 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellow researching mobile data visualization, interactive storytelling, and news application design. Early in her career, Smith worked as a corporate software developer and user experience designer before an enthusiastic return to the news industry.

Designing for Customization: How to Build a Modular News Theme

Kevin Koehler

I work for Automattic on the Terms of Service team, where we deal with issues of abuse, law, and censorship for the millions of sites using our platforms.

The Care and Feeding of Open-Source-Skeptical Colleagues

Linda Gorman

Linda has spent the last couple of years building editorial sites for Upstatement in Boston, including lots of custom curatorial tools for WordPress. Before becoming a web developer, she studied journalism at Syracuse University.

Admins Are Users Too

Meagan Ball

Meagan Kelleher Ball is Director of Digital Content for Tribune Media, the parent company of 42 TV stations and other digital properties. Meagan oversees the development of the station websites and their iOS and Android news apps, and consults on overall digital strategy. Meagan led the redesign and relaunch of the websites on WordPress.com VIP.

On a day to day basis, Meagan guides and collaborates with more than 200 web producers in over 30 newsrooms, as well as communicates with news directors, creative services departments, and sales teams.

Prior to Tribune Media, Meagan was Director of Digital Content for Local TV LLC, which was acquired by Tribune in 2013. Meagan also managed digital teams at WDAF in Kansas City and KPLC in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Making Everyone Happy: Managing a Large Network of Sites

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Announcing WordCamp for Publishers Speakers: Part 2

We’re very excited to continue to announce our speakers and sessions for the inaugural WordCamp for Publishers. This is the second of four posts introducing our full lineup.

They will be sharing insights and perspectives that span many different roles within the publishing industry. We hope you’ll join them in Denver to hear what they have to offer!

Gabriel Koen

VP of Technology at PMC, overseeing product and engineering for our brands. Have worked on solutions for print workflow tools for the topic with Variety, WWD, Robb Report, and other PMC brands.

Integrating print and digital / print workflow tools in WordPress

Jake Goldman

Jake is the owner and President of 10up, a full service agency that makes a better web with finely crafted websites and tools for content creators. Whether you’re a political junky glued to FiveThirtyEight, a car enthusiast reading MotorTrend, a Windows user who keeps up with Microsoft’s newsroom, an Apple fan reading 9to5mac daily, a tech entrepreneur keeping up with TechCrunch or VentureBeat, or even if you just use WordPress itself, you’ve experienced a small sample of 10up’s work, built atop WordPress. Jake grew 10up from a 1 man show (himself!) to over 100 employees with dozens of brand name clients in under 5 years.

Jake started focusing on web content management platforms like WordPress in 2006, releasing free plug-ins, diverting new projects to the platform, contributing code to the open source project, and engaging the community. He has been a writer and expert reviewer for Smashing Magazine, taught WordPress development at Boston University, and has spoken at conferences, universities, and programs around the country. He helped organize the first WordCamp Boston in 2010, founded the WordPress meetup in Providence, and rebooted the Sacramento meet up in a format that continues on to this day. He is a core contributor to WordPress, and maintains some of the highest rated plug-ins on the official repository, with over 500,000 active installations.

Distribute All The Things: WordPress & The Era of Multiple Content Channels

Jake Spurlock

Jake is a senior member of the WIRED Tech team, He spends most days working on engineering tasks that encompass digital publishing, API authoring, and web performance. He was the chief architect on WIRED’s Apple News integration, which was highlighted in the WWDC keynote. He also open-sourced the Facebook Instant Articles plugin for WordPress, and was then featured by Facebook during their F8 developer event, and has since become a member of their Open Source advocacy group at Facebook. In addition to personal projects, He has built tools for better handling of podcasts, and other editorial tools like Curator, WIRED’s front-page scheduling app.

Monetize All The Things: How Condé Nast Profits From Multiple Channels

Jason Bahl

Jason is a Senior WordPress Engineer at Digital First Media where he works on large publishing sites such as DenverPost.com, OrangeCountyRegister.com and TwinCities.com. He’s been using WordPress since 2009 and has been working with WordPress full-time since 2010. He’s currently the project lead of the open source WP Plugin “WPGraphQL,” which brings a GraphQL API to WordPress.

Syndicating Content with the WP REST API and WPGraphQL

Jay Moore

Jay is a strategic marketer with experience spanning a number of industries over nearly 15 years. Starting off as a freelance graphic designer and marketer for small businesses, he fell into a career in non-profits before shifting focus to the advertising world. Jay’s understanding of websites and their traffic patterns has led to cutting edge application of analytics and website architecture, improving the visitor experience and driving revenue for clients. After rising to the level of vice president of a national advertising agency, Jay came to 10up to focus on developing successful strategies and tactics for clients of all sizes in all industries.

Having worked on more than 40 website builds (mostly on WordPress), Jay embraces an entrepreneurial spirit that makes websites come to life. From start up inventors to global retailers, Jay thrives on the challenge of maximizing audience impact.

Jay lives in Oklahoma with his wife and son, and enjoys playing golf, traveling, and photography. In his spare time he is typically found chasing his son around the backyard or splashing in the pool, but also enjoys grilling and spending time with family and friends.

The project scope will change. Here’s how you make it a tolerable – if even pleasant – experience.

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Announcing WordCamp for Publishers Speakers: Part 1

We’re very excited to announce our speakers and sessions for the inaugural WordCamp for Publishers. This is the first of four posts introducing our full lineup.

They will be sharing insights and perspectives that span many different roles within the publishing industry. We hope you’ll join them in Denver to hear what they have to offer!

Andres Escobar

Andres Escobar is the Lead Platform Developer at IOneDigital. He is a self-taught digital architect that believes in the WordPress mission to democratize publishing.

In his spare time, Andres volunteers teaching kids how to code in his home town of Hoboken, NJ.

Ben Ilfeld

Ben is Lead Audience & Revenue Strategist at 10up, a full service digital agency focused on creating amazing web and content management experiences with a passionate team of 135+ full-time strategists, designers and engineers working around the globe.

Ben has 10 years of experience as an entrepreneur, publisher and innovator, that make him well suited to 10up’s monetization, content conversion, and ad ops business. He has led product development, analysis and iterative design processes, while overseeing all business operations at The Sacramento Press and AdGlue. Ben has consistently stepped over the edge to experiment with new models for creating healthy media ecosystems.

In 2008, Ben launched The Sacramento Press as a new breed of local publication dedicated to rethinking how media interacts with a local audience. In just a few years, his team built an army of over 1,500 volunteer community contributors. During this time, Ben built the first independent online local ad network (SLOAN) that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for over 60 publishers. He was also a founding board member of the Local Independent Online News publishers (LION).

Daniel Bachhuber

Daniel is currently the principal at Hand Built and has previously worked with a number of impressive companies. He also maintains WP-CLI, the command line interface for WordPress, and contributes to many other open source projects.

Daniel Olson

Dan is COO at DigitalCube, a WordPress solutions company with offices in the US and Japan. He lives and works in Philadelphia PA, home to the first WordCamp US.

His work includes building WordPress SaaS products focused on security and scalability, offering advanced security services through AWS, and providing managed web hosting support for eCommerce clients, large media organizations, and higher education.

Away from the keyboard he enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, eating everything, tasting all the beers, traveling to meet new people and helping with the family business, a pet boutique and bakery named after his dog, Amelie’s Bark Shop.

Deepti Boddapati

Deepti is a full stack developer at Crowd Favorite. During her career, she has implemented location based content search, and delivery features for large high traffic sites, as well as smaller sites. In doing these implementations, she discovered that the biggest obstacle wasn’t a technical challenge but a knowledge challenge. She’s now committed to bridging this gap by providing everyone with the jargon free knowledge to implement these solutions effectively.