The WordCamp for Publishers schedule features a range of speakers who work with journalists and publications on all aspects of digital publishing. They’ll lead discussions and workshops on a variety of topics, including WordPress publishing workflows, distribution methods, content syndication and tooling, censorship, modular layout design, open-source in newsrooms, and site architecture.
We’re proud to announce the following speakers who will be presenting, leading discussions, and hosting workshops. Keep an eye on this list as we will be updating with more speakers in the coming weeks.
Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron
Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron is the founder of Aimee Gonzalez Consulting, which focuses on collaborating with subject matter experts to “clarify the ambiguous” in their own work. She calls on her background in international relations, writing, and education to design + develop WordPress websites, create + teach tailored professional development programs, and evaluate current learning & development efforts in companies. Aimee also guest teaches, most recently in an Advanced User Experience course at Harvard University.
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.
Dwayne McDaniel
Dwayne McDaniel been working in tech and open source sales since 2005. I knew as soon as I started working with Java middleware developers I never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. I first started building in Drupal and WordPress when I needed to build projects for the San Francisco Improv scene. I fell in the love the community of developers and then found my position at Pantheon at the end of 2013. As a Community and Agency Success Manager I have had the privilege of presenting at MidCamp (Drupal), WordCamp Milwaukee, WordCamp Baltimore, Drupal Northern Lights (Iceland), Stanford DrupalCamp and other conferences. Outside of tech I love producing and performing improv theater. I also love comic books and karaoke!!! Reach out at http://mcdwayne.com or on twitter @mcdwayne
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Paul Olund
Paul comes from a varied media background: Capitol Hill punditry, music journalism, interactive storytelling, cable news, big-arm publishing and a Silicon Beach startup. Today, he spends his time in Los Angeles, building products for the USA TODAY NETWORK.
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.
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.
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. Whitney is now a Senior Team Lead at 10up.
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.