Today I flew out out for Wordcamp Atlanta. This is my first blogging conference of 2010. This will be my first word camp in the south. This will be the second Wordcamp I am speaking at. This is my seventh blogging conference I’ve attended. I am excited!
I met Tammy Hart at the hotel and then we headed out with Wade and Lisa for Wordcamp Atlanta. After picking up my badge, I went to Topher Kohan’s session, “SEO and WordPress” (video coming soon).
Topics for Wordcamp
I’m was looking forward to attending, “The Secrets of Mobile Vlogging” tonight but missed it. Thankfully all sessions are being recorded and will be available online! For tomorrow I will attend, “WordPress Security – Protecting your WordPress from Inside Out” by Syed of WPBeginner. I want to attend the “Advanced Google Analytics & WordPress Integration” by Rusty Tanton of WebMD but I will be doing my 2 hour WordPress 101 training from 10am to noon.
Yes, if you’re a WordPress beginner and attending Wordcamp Atlanta, attend my session to get a road map, see how to do a WordPress install, learn how SEO works and ask your questions!
Diversity at Wordcamp
I want to talk about an issue that doesn’t come up much in open source. That is diversity.
One of the reasons I started attending these blogging conferences was to see if they were really any different than other technology conferences like the ones held by Microsoft and VMWare. They are! I am taking a more active role every few months in spreading the word about the benefits of participating in a local Wordcamp or blogging conference.
For this event:
- There will be a total of 22 speakers
- There are 4 women speaking
- there will be six brown speakers at this Wordcamp
It was expected that a good number of attendees would be Brown and from what I saw tonight, that was the case! I am so happy to see so many people who look like me at this event! I had a great conversation with Andrea who works for a nonprofit about what it’s like to go to a conference and not see anyone who looks like you. Hooray!
I’m very excited about this as there has been a lack of diversity in both speakers and attendees at the other blogging conferences EXCEPT those that targeted Brown people, women or other groups considered to be a “minority” (Blogging While Brown, Blogher and Blogalicious)
I look forward to meeting all of you tomorrow!
