Winter WordPress Community events

December 28, 2016

Winter has arrived and before enjoying these holidays we have a lot to tell. WordCamps have been held in Manila, Nepal, Athens, Buenos Aires and Baltimore. Our OnTheGoSystems family continues creating communities all over the world.

WordCamp Athens

This past 19th-20th November, WordCamp Athens was held. This time, we had a super team there: Konstantinos Kouratoras was one of the organisers; Andreas Panagiotopoulos, Mladen Andrejic and Joanna Dawid were part of our representatives team and Dimitris Mitsis had a presentation about a short use-case of automated testing in WPML.

WordCamp Athens: Joanna, Mladen, Andreas and Dimitris
WordCamp Athens: Joanna, Mladen, Andreas and Dimitris

According to Konstantinos:

“The most important thing was to build a solid organizing team able to work together to the last minute. The team consisted of 15 people from all over Greece and, fortunately, we cooperated very well together. We also had invaluable help from the volunteers team, which consisted of 16 people. Moreover, we had people supporting in specific areas like design (we have a great Wapuu, don’t we?), photography, videography and volunteers from the red cross (in case of accidents on the day of the event  – fortunately we had none).”

WordCamp Athens: Kostas and other organisers
WordCamp Athens: Kostas and other organisers

“Regarding the talks, we received a total of 62 applications from 11 countries. We made a final selection of 20 speakers, split into 2 parallel tracks. The quality of the talks was really high and we received very good feedback about them. It’s worth mentioning that Dimitris gave a great talk about automated tests and the topic seemed to interest a lot of people. Well done Dimitris!”

WordCamp Athens: Dimitris during his talk
WordCamp Athens: Dimitris during his talk

“I would recommend to everyone to get involved in local communities and become part of such organizing teams. It’s not only about contributing back to the WordPress community. You also gain experience and, in the end, you have this great feeling that you were part of the reason for so many people to meet each other, socialize, discuss ideas, collaborate, learn things and improve skills.”

WordCamp Denpasar and WordCamp Manila

WordCamp Denpasar: Dat and Emerson
WordCamp Denpasar: Dat and Emerson

On the same weekend, Emerson Maningo and Dat Hoang spoke at WordCamp Denpasar on Introducing WordPress Actions and Filters for Beginning Developers and Going Global with WordPress Multilingual respectively.

This is Dat’s presentation:

And just a couple of weeks later, our dynamic duo, attacked again and spoke at WordCamp Manila , December 10th. There were around 80 attendees and to quote Dat:

“The good point is, it gathered people working on WordPress from all parts of Philippines.”

WordCamp Manila: Dat and Emerson
WordCamp Manila: Dat and Emerson

WordCamp Kathmandu

WordCamp Kathmandu: Shekhar
WordCamp Kathmandu: Shekhar

In Kathmandu, our Shekhar Bhandari volunteered for WordCamp Kathmandu which counted for around 250 participants this year!

But let’s read in Shekhar own words his experience as volunteer for the first time:

“I was as a volunteer in this event and this was a first time experience for me! I feel so happy that I chose to volunteer as I felt myself absorbed in something very inspiring.   I was selected as an Accessibility volunteer and I was given the duty to take care of one of the speakers, who was visually-impaired. He presented a talk on why developers should consider accessibility as a key factor when developing themes and plugins with real live examples.”

WordCamp Baltimore

WordCamp Baltimore: Lauren
WordCamp Baltimore: Lauren

Continuing with Lauren’s tour around North America, this time she had the chance to speak at WordCamp Baltimore. Here, she gave a great talk about Support Starts Here – How To Go The Extra Mile To Make and KEEP Your Customers Happy.

Fortunately, we are also lucky to watch her talk in wordpress.tv:

Meetup La Plata

MeetUp La Plata: Mer, Gastón, Marcé, Ignacio, Laura, Otto
MeetUp La Plata: Mer, Gastón, Marcé, Ignacio, Laura, Otto

Our Argentinian team (Mer, Laura and Otto) also continue working and held the last WordPress MeetUp for this 2016: SEO y WordPress. They ended this year with more  than 200 members in their group and they have also built some alliances with people interested in creating a  WordPress community in their locality.

As Otto says:

“Essentially, people become involved and are truly happy to have this in their own city.”

WordCamp Barcelona

On December 3rd, I (Andrés Cifuentes) was speaking at WordCamp Barcelona about creating WordPress Multilingual communities which I hope will soon be on wordpress.tv. In the meantime, you can see my slide presentation here:

WordCamp Sao Paulo

Also to end the year, Otto Wald  was a speaker at a WordCamp for the first time. The place chosen for it was WordCamp Sao Paulo. We don’t have any pictures yet, so we will have to wait until the WordCamp organisers release the official shots.

Upcoming events

For starting this 2017 we already have some news!

Bigul Malayi will be organising the first WordCamp Kochi in February 19th! Bigul has been working a lot with the Indian community and after several years he will finally have his WordCamp. Bigul will also attend as volunteer at WordCamp Pune on January 15th.

Jakub Milczarek will be also co-organising WordCamp Lublin  in June!

Do you want to know what else to expect in 2017? Don’t miss our next article.

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