Tag Archives: speakers

Announcing Our Speakers

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After processing a lot of speaker applications, I’m excited to announce that we have a great lineup of speakers for WordCamp Portland. We’ll share a bit more about these folks’ background and the details of their sessions as we get closer to the event, but here’s our list of session titles and speakers:

  • _doing_it_wrong: Improving Your Development Skills Through Examining Bad Practices – Zack Tollman
  • The Art & Science of Premium – Shane Pearlman
  • Blogging as a Platform: Making a Name For Yourself in Your Targeted Community – Kiersi Burkhart
  • Don’t Put That In Functions.php! (Or, How to Write A Basic Plugin) – Kailey Lampert
  • Frankenblog: Group Blogging with WordPress for Fun, Frustration, & Financial Gain – Robert Wagner
  • How to Blog Once a Day – Laura Kimball
  • How to Build a Professional WordPress Business – Grant Landram
  • How to Use WP-Cron – Ben Lobaugh
  • Questions You’re Too Embarrassed to Ask – Eric Mann
  • Why we Click “Publish”: Advocating for User-Centricity through Interaction Design – Taylor Dewey
  • WordPress + E-Commerce = $$$ – Justin Sainton
  • WordPress Security 101 (and beyond) – Robert Rowley

In addition to these pre-planned sessions, we’ll have timeslots during the day available for unconference-style sessions to be organized by attendees on the day of the event. More information about the unconference will be shared as we get closer to WordCamp Portland.

You have already purchased your ticket, right?

About Those Speaking Proposals…

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The WordCamp Portland organizing team got together this past week and made some hard decisions about who will (and won’t) be part of our lineup of featured speakers for this year’s event. We’re confirming things with our speakers and will be announcing the first set of speakers early this coming week, but here are some interesting stats about our speaker submissions this year:

  • 35 people proposed a total of 51 sessions
  • Of those 51 proposed sessions, 12 will be offered as our feature presentations
  • This means we had to turn down over 75% of the proposed sessions
  • 13 of the sessions (25%) were proposed by women
  • Of the 35 folks who submitted topics, about half (18) were from outside the Portland metro area.
  • Of the people selected in our initial round of speaker choices, about half are from outside the Portland metro area.
  • We asked potential speakers to identify the audience for their talks, offering them four choices. Of the 51 sessions, here’s how many times each choice was tagged for the potential audience (more than one audience could be identified per talk):
    • WordPress Beginners: 27
    • Experienced Bloggers: 19
    • Designers: 14
    • Developers: 29
  • Our program will be approximately 2/3 prescheduled sessions and 1/3 unconference sessions.