WordCamp Montréal

Le français suit.

After some initial planning we have settled on the August 28-29 date for WordCamp 2010. It will be a two-day event at a downtown location (still not pinned down).

Wait, wtf is WordCamp?

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

Tickets will be 40$ and should be available for purchase sometime next week from EventBrite. We’ll post again when you can come to the site and register.

For now we hope you’ll reserve the date and consider being an active participant in WCMTL from the start. WordCamp is organized by the community in Montreal (i.e. a few passionate core volunteers) and we depend on the contributions and involvement of the wider community to make it the success we all know it can be.

Consider getting involved:

• Become a speaker – WordCamp is about sharing knowledge and teaching each other how to use WordPress more effectively. That requires presenters to assign themselves a topic and come to the event prepared to share it with everyone else. We are looking for all kinds of talks, from web-writing tips to hardcore development, so almost anyone could be a speaker if they put some time into it, why not you?
• Volunteer for WordCamp – For the most part the core organizers will take care of things, but leading up to and during the event there is too much for the three of us to handle. Sign up as a volunteer and promise to do a few hours of work and we’ll love you (and give you a free ticket if you want ;)
• Sponsor WordCamp, or convince your boss to -  Those who have been to other tech conferences know that 40$ for a two-day even with catered lunch is nothing. This is possible because gracious companies and professionals sponsor WordCamp, supporting the local community and generating good-will and awareness about their brands at the same time. Please consider being a sponsor of WordCamp 2010 or promoting the idea to a company that you think would be a good fit.
• Also on the sponsorship page is information about our ‘micro-sponsor’ program, where freelancers can support WordCamp without breaking the bank with a $200 donation that includes their registration fee. A limited number of micro-sponsorships will be available during the ticket buying process, so start thinking now if you can afford it (of course you can, WordPress has provided, hasn’t it?)

Okay, that’s probably enough for now. If you want to learn more about WordCamp Montreal 2010 you can read the about page, which explains the history and goals of WordCamp, and the schedule page, which outlines what the content of WordCamp will be like.

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WordCamp aura lieu le 28 et 29 août 2010. Nous recherchons des conférenciers, commanditaires et bénévoles!

Après un peu de planification, on a finalement choisi les 28 et 29 août  pour WordCamp2010. Ce sera un événement de deux jours quelque part au centre-ville (endroit exact pas encore confirmé).

Attendez, c’est quoi WordCamp?

WordCamp c’est une conférence axée sur tout ce qui se rapporte à WordPress.  Les WordCamps sont des événements informels organisés par la communauté des utilisateurs de WordPress comme vous.  Tout  le monde, des utilisateurs occasionnels aux développeurs purs et durs, participe, échange des idées et socialise.

Les billets coûteront 40$ et devraient être disponibles au cours de la semaine prochaine sur EventBrite.  Nous vous informerons ici quand vous pourrez vous enregistrer sur le site.  

Pour l’instant, nous espérons que vous allez bloquer ces dates et envisager de devenir  un participant actif de WCMTL dès le départ. WordCamp est organisé par la communauté à Montréal (c’est-à-dire  un tout petit noyau dur de  bénévoles passionnés) et nous dépendons de la contribution et de l’implication de la communauté élargie pour que l’événement devienne le succès qu’il mérite.

Pourquoi ne pas vous impliquer:

• Devenez conférencier –  à WordCamp, on partage nos connaissances et on s’éduque les uns les autres sur les façons les plus efficaces d’utiliser WordPress.  Les présentateurs  devront se choisir un sujet et venir  à la conférence fins prêts à le partager avec tout le monde.  On recherche des conférences en tous genres, des trucs d’écriture web au développement pur et dur. Presque tout le monde peut  devenir conférencier, pourquoi pas vous?
• Devenez bénévoles pour WordCamp – Le comité organisateur va s’occuper de la majorité des tâches mais d’ici à la conférence et pendant son déroulement, il y a trop à faire pour nous trois.  Inscrivez-vous comme bénévole , engagez -vous à faire quelques heures de travail et nous vous adorerons (et vous aurez droit à un billet gratuit, si vous le désirez ;)
• Commanditez WordCamp ou convainquez votre patron de le faire – Ceux qui ont déjà participé à une conférence tech savent que deux jours de conférence avec lunch fourni pour 40$, c’est donné. C’est rendu possible grâce à la généreuse contribution d’entreprises et de professionnels qui, en commanditant WordCamp, s’impliquent dans leur communauté tout en contribuant à augmenter la notoriété positive de leur marque. S’il vous plaît, pensez à devenir commanditaire de WordCamp 2010 ou à en promouvoir l’idée  auprès d’une entreprise qui aurait des affinités avec l’événement.  
• En outre, sur la page des commandites vous pourrez lire au sujet de notre programme de micro-commandite qui permet aux travailleurs autonomes de soutenir WordCamp sans se ruiner, grâce à un don de 200$ qui inclut les frais d’inscription. Les  micro-commandites  seront disponibles pendant le processus d’achat de billets et leur nombre sera limité, alors commencez à compter vos sous (bien sûr que vous en avez les moyens, grâce à WordPress, n’est-ce pas?)

Bon, ça suffitpour l’instant. Si vous voulez en savoir plus au sujet de WordCamp Montréal 2010, vous pouvez consulter la page À propos qui explique l’histoire et les objectifs de WordCamp et l’horaire, qui décrit l’événement dans ses grandes lignes.

Hi everyone!

On Friday night there was a WCMTL planning meeting at the Vanilla offices. Brendan Sera-Sriar, Shannon Smith and I (Jeremy Clarke) attended. For now we will form the core team for this upcoming WordCamp, though we want to include everyone in the process.

This site (RSS feed), the planning Google Group, our Twitter account and the Facebook Group will all be updated with new information as it becomes official and things like tickets go on sale, so sign up to stay up to date! Below are summaries of the major points we discussed during the meeting.

Date

We talked about some of the different dates already proposed and decided that late/end of August would be best. The two potential weekends are Aug 21-22 or Aug 28-29. For now we are going to take advantage of the extra week of planning time and state the date as Aug 28-29, with the caveat that if a particularly awesome venue is available for the week before we may choose that instead.

Venue

We discussed our venue needs but didn’t come to any firm conclusions. Our ideal would be to find a university/cegep venue that already has all the AV and seating stuff that we’ll need, but we don’t know of any that are available at this point. The building Vanilla lives in has offered us several large rooms and we can use this as a fallback location but it would require renting chairs and organizing all the projectors/screens/audio equipment ourselves. The Vanilla building is also unlikely to offer a single room that could hold all participants for big meetings (i.e. seating 150 people). We could live without a giant room and big shared talks if necessary.

Any leads on educational or other venues that would be free or affordable are very welcome, if you know someone WordPress-friendly at a Montreal university or Cegep please get in touch.

Website

The website for this year will use the same domain and structure as last years, http://wordcampmontreal.org but with some aesthetic changes to make it feel like a different event (and obviously updates to all content).

Shannon has offered to be in charge of press releases and press relations and will work with me (Jeremy) on the website content.

Like last year tickets will be sold through EventBrite (they will probably have a similar price, 35$)

Volunteers

We are hoping to get people signed up as early as possible as volunteers. Volunteers will get free admission to the event but will be expected to put in several hours of incredibly fun work-time to compensate. You will also recieve bragging rights and free hugs from Brendan upon request. Once the site is relaunched for this year there will be a form where you can sign up.

Sponsors

Sponsorship will probably work mostly like last year. We discussed donation tiers and settled on a relatively obvious set of choices:

• Platinum $10,000
• Gold $5,000
• Silver $1,000
• Alluminum $500

We also plan to offer a low-price sponsorship package for freelancers, $100 or $200, which won’t get your logo on the poster or website but will buy you a position on a special page of freelancers who care deeply about WordPress Community. There will be a limited number of these sponsorships for sale, probably 20, to ensure that everyone who invests in this idea can be featured on the resulting page. We will sell these packages via EventBrite, so they will be purchased instead of a ticket to the event and will get you into all activities. Special investors will also have a special sticker on their badges so everyone knows how sexy they are.

Anyone have feedback about the price of this freelancer package? 200$ woiuld mean less dependence on other sponsors and we could feature the list even more, but would  obviously be less affordable for a lot of people.

Schedule

We discussed several elements of the schedule for this WordCamp but agreed that the practical considerations listed above are more urgent and immediately in need of solving.

We didn’t come to a firm conclusion about whether this should be a one or two day event. Both have their benefits and it may depend on our venue.

We agreed that the schedule should feature as much balance between development and content-production as possible, and that we hope to have balanced speakers like last year or even better if possible.

Speakers

Once the website is relaunched to reflect this new WordCamp there will be a form for speakers to enter their personal information and propose topics. We hope you will start thinking now about topics you would like to present and start working on your info about them. If you can, prepare the following information about your topic:

your name,
your bio,
talk name,
talk description.

For examples and information please go look at last year’s schedule which is up on the site now: http://wordcampmontreal.org/schedule/

Meetups in the meantime

Ma.tt is going to be in town for much of July and he wants to hang out with us! http://ma.tt/2010/06/to-montreal/

Moving WordCamp itself up a month isn’t really feasible but we can certainly have some warmup get-togethers in the meantime. We will be in touch with matt and with this group and the facebook one to announce some social get-togethers (at a bar) and hopefully at least one informational meetup next month.

Lots to do, lets get started!

Thanks for your interest in WordCamp and we hope you can all be involved as Sponsors, Speakers and Volunteers! Keep in touch.

NOTE: THESE VIDEOS ARE FROM WORDCAMP 2009, NOT THE UPCOMMING WORDCAMP 2010.

My roomate Arthur (who does amazing work for the under-appreciated TV McGill) is going through the process of digitizing and uploading all of the video he shot at WordCamp. Eventually everything from Room 1 should be available (if you filmed room2 please get in touch with me, I’ll give you the login for the blip.tv account so you can upload the video!)

You can see all our videos on the Blip.tv Archive page. You can also find the player below in our video page, which is in the top navigation

Videos we’ve uploaded so far (jul29-09): Q&A with ma.tt, Future of WP with Jane Wells, Theming for Noobs with Jeremy Clarke, WP Security with Brad Williams, Flashpress by Brendan Sera-Sriar.

This player should have all the videos so far. There will be more soon so subscribe to rss updates if you’re interested.

As it often happens after organizing an event like WordCamp, I am now getting emails from people looking for good WordPress ressources, namely developers, theme designers and project managers.

I wanted to share that opportunity with everybody, if you are available these days (let’s say for some work in august or september), post your availability here and I will put you in touch with the people that sent me requests (and will redirect others here too).

Nous avons pour vous 2 serveurs dédiés gratuits pendant 12 mois (valeur de 1629$US chacun), des jeux de Xbox 360, des t-shirts geek et plusieurs autres prix très intéressants!

Veuillez simplement répondre à ce billet avec votre nom et courriel et peut-être aurez-vous la chance de gagner un des merveilleux prix (ouvert seulement aux participants de WordCamp Montréal 2009, nous allons vérifier avec la liste des inscriptions lors du tirage au sort).

Bonne chance à tous et à l’année prochaine!

I got a really sensible request for a place to list job offers for WCMTL participants. While we’re all here it’s a great opportunity for business owners to get together with developers and plan some contracts.

Instead of a giant pad I thought it would be cool to just use the comments on this post to list job offers. So if you’re looking to hire a WP developer, designer, writer or anything else please leave a comment here so those looking for work can get back to you.

Please leave your name, website and if possible a photo of you so people can recognize you at the event. The attendee list has photos of a lot of people based on their Gravatars, and those will also show up next to your comments, so if you don’t have a link to a photo of you make sure you have signed up for a Gravatar so people can find you to talk about the project.

Good luck!

We’re getting really close! Are you ready for WordCamp? Here’s some help just in case.

Schedule

The full daily and hourly schedule of talks and breaks is now available on our site. It’s pretty final at this point but might be changed slightly leading up to the event. Note that there will be coffee and snacks both mornings and lunch the first day but not the second day.

List of registered attendees

Want to learn about your fellow WordPress fans before the event? Figure out who you want to meet and talk to (and maybe who to avoid :P )? Check out the attendee list. It’s got pictures of most people and links to everyones blogs. Might also be a good place to look after the event to get in touch with that person you met who’s name you forgot.

BYOL: Bring Your Own Lanyard

Okay, so I priced different namebadge solutions and it turned out the nice fancy clippy ones are like 4$ each which would mean over 500$ for everyone at WordCamp. That seemed like a bad way to spend money (compared to, say, coffee) so we went for some pretty cheap ones and kept the money for something else. I was thinking, don’t you already have a ton of fancy old lanyards at home from other conferences? If you do bring them in and you can put your WordCamp namebadge in it for the weekend. It saves the conference money and we’ll have way more diversity, so everyone wins. (Of course this is optional, the ones we have are fine).

Ticket sales will close thursday night – Registration available at the venue

We’ll be closing the online registration tonight so that we have time to print out a list of registrants, but the SAT is big and we’ll still have space for walk-ins. You’ll be able to register at the door with cash only. We also can’t guarantee t-shirts and swag bags for walk-ins but hopefully there will be enough to go around.

See everyone there!

Aux participants du WebCamp Montréal: merci de transmettre ce communiqué à tous les journalistes que ça pourrait intéresser.

Le créateur de WordPress à Montréal

Matt Mullenweg, co-fondateur et créateur de WordPress est en visite à Montréal avec quelques membres de son équipe pour le WordCamp Montréal 2009.

Les 11 et 12 juillet prochains a lieu à la SAT, à Montréal, une petite conférence sur WordPress, la célèbre plate forme de publication sur Internet en code-source libre (Open source). WordPress a d’abord permis à des millions d’usagers à travers le monde de se créer gratuitement leur propre blog. Aujourd’hui cette même plate-forme permet de développer des projets collectifs avec WordPress MU (Multi User) et des réseaux sociaux avec BuddyPress. Comme WordPress est résolument en code-source libre, toute une communauté de développeurs à travers le monde y crée des applications, y compris à Montréal.
Mattt Mullenweg, une des personnalités les plus appréciées et les plus connues du Web, sera disponible pour des entrevues.

Information sur WordPress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
http://wordpress.org/about/

Information sur Matt Mullenweg:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mullenweg
http://ma.tt/about/

Information sur le WordCamp Montréal:
http://wordcampmontreal.org/

Pour assister au WordCamp Montréal, contacter Jeremy Clarke:
http://wordcampmontreal.org/contact/

Since we announced #wcmtl a few months ago tons of people have asked how they can help or lend a hand. To all those people here’s your chance!

There’s just under a week until WordCamp. We’ve got almost everything worked out to make sure its a smooth ride, but me (Jeremy) and Sylvain are only two people, and we’ll need a lot of help on the actual days.

Volunteer positions we need!

• Greeters and Helpers: We’re going to need at least two people managing the registration table at all times to make sure people coming in are registered, have their badges and shirts etc. We’ll also be calling on you to help get thigns set up and taken apart as necessary (so hopefully some people will be willing to come in early).  Ideally enough people will offer to help with this that we have too many in case someone needs a break or doesn’t make it. Hopefully everyone at WordCamp will be helpful, but please sign up if you’re interested so I know who you are and that you want to help :)
• Driver: Unfortunately I don’t even have a drivers license, so if someone has a car and is willing to help us move big things around it would be incredibly helpful. We specifically need someone who can pick up the shirts with me from the printer’s on Friday afternoon (1oth) and drop some big stuff off at the venue. It would also be great if anyone can have their car at the event, in case we need to run out and buy something heavy.
• Videographers: It would be amazing if we had most of the talks from #wcmtl available on WordPress.tv, we don’t have the money to pay a professional so we’re depending on friendly attendees to film things. My roomate is going to be there but the more people the better. If you can bring your camera and tape even a couple of presentations (and put them up on blip.tv after) it would be a huge help. (Photographers: We want you too! We’ll be publicizing our Flickr pool you can add your shots to!)

Sound fun? Most people who are interested will probably fall into the Greeters and Helpers category, you’ll be our ambassadors (great way to make new friends!).

If you’re interested please fill out the form below (it will save the data to a google spreadsheet used only by the event organzers).

Details still to be confirmed, but there will be a WordCamp alcohol-drinking evening after the first day of the conference. Our intended venue is St-Sulpice, a huge bar within easy walking distance of the SAT with an even huger outdoor patio that should be able to fit as many of us as we can wrangle. They also have adequate bar food so people can eat there if they want.

1680 rue St-Denis, Montreal, QC
(514) 844-9458 lesaintsulpice.ca
Google Maps Link

[Photo from St-Sulpice website. NOTE: Holy broken flash hell Batman!]

WordCamp talks will probably end around 4:30-5pm, we’ll be meeting at St-Sulpice around 6. Please confirm all details at WordCamp as they may change. Hope to see you there!