I’m Nick Ohrn and I’m one of the co-organizers for the Seattle WordPress meetup as well as WordCamp Seattle. Jeff has graciously allowed me to write an article for WP Tavern about WordCamp Seattle and why you should go.
I’ll cut straight to the chase – WordCamp Seattle 2011 is going to be amazing. First, we already have a vibrant and thriving community of WordPress users and developers in Seattle. Our monthly meetup has 300+ members and the March meeting had 90+ actual attendees.
Next, WordCamp Seattle 2011 features two keynote sessions that are going to knock people’s socks off. The opening day keynote is by Scott Berkun of Automattic. Scott will be talking about the WordPress.com product, how Automattic decides what features go into WordPress.com and eventually make there way into the self hosted version of WordPress and how a distributed company like Automattic works on a practical level.
The end of day keynote session will be an interview session with Alex King of Crowd Favorite, an early WordPress contributor and amazing business man. I’ll be conducting the interview on stage (similar to the SxSW fireside chat format) and we’re going to be discussing how he came upon WordPress, what he thinks of the WordPress community, how he sees open source work evolving, what the deal was with WP Help Center and more. It’ll be a can’t miss.
Finally, there is a ton of awesome content lined up for the rest of the day. I’m not going to delineate the speakers in this post (but you should check out the schedule) but I know a lot of them personally and am very excited to learn new and interesting things.
If you’re on the fence about WordPress Seattle and you think you can make it, I highly recommend you do so. We dropped the ticket prices because we have garnered a lot of support from sponsors across the industry, so you can get in for $30. If you can make it, I highly suggest buying a ticket and joining us as we make this one of the best WordCamps ever.