We’re really sad that Adii Pienaar has had to pull out of speaking at WordCamp Europe. Adii, it won’t be the same without you.

However, we have got an excellent replacement in the form of WordPress Lead Developer, Andrew Nacin, who’ll be presenting on “WordPress 3.7: Foundations.” Nacin will also be around to help out at the Contributor Day, along with other core WordPress developers.

This has also meant some minor changes to the schedule so make sure you check it out the full schedule to see if any of the presentations you want to attend have moved around.

Floor Drees is originally from The Netherlands, but moved to Vienna, Austria 2 years ago. She is an experienced event organiser, having organised a number of Rails Girls events, co-organising vienna.rb, and the WordPress user group in Vienna. She’s a tech reporter for inventures.eu and a developer evangelist at usersnap.com. After working as a community manager for over 5 years, she missed making stuff and started to learn programming last year. In her presentation “Working towards great version control for content creators”, she’ll merge her interest in programming with her interest in creating content.

As someone who writes with other people, I often encounter the same problem: you either email tiny changes to your article to the one who’s ultimately responsible for the website, which is bound to go wrong. Or you log into your CMS, make some changes to your piece and save it, while one of the other editors does the exact same thing, just using another shiny laptop. Changes get lost. Stuff gets added twice and you end up frustrated because the preview doesn’t reflect your work. Now this is annoying as it is, but if you program a bit on the side (like I do) and you use version control, you know that there is a solution for that. For WordCamp, I’ll gather my thoughts on what would make a great version control tool for WordPress and test existing plugins by these requirements.

Joining us from Washington DC is Sean Herron. Sean is a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House working on Open Data Initiatives with the Food and Drug Administration. Sean is a digital strategist, web developer, and policy expert dedicated to creating easier ways for citizens to interact with their government. Most recently, he served as a Strategist in the Open Innovation office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where he spearheaded open data and open source initiatives for the agency. Sean is responsible for one of the first deployed WordPress instances in the U.S. Government, openNASA, and frequently works with other agencies to advise on best practices for WordPress security, community building, and open source participation. He has a passion for web standards and responsive design and graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Public Policy from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

His presentation will be “WordPress as a Platform: Empowering Civic Change through Code”.

The growth of WordPress across the internet has brought phenomenal change in the way organizations are able to interact with their audiences. Beyond simple website generation, the flexibility of WordPress as a CMS has enabled governments and civic groups to rapidly create tools used by millions of citizens to better understand and interact with their communities. Discover how organizations like NASA and the White House are using WordPress to catalog and share open data, offer electronic services, and solicit feedback from citizen, and learn best practices in security, usability, and performance when designing WordPress platforms designed to scale to millions of users.

WordPress 3.5 saw a transformation in the way media was handled in WordPress. We’re lucky to have two of the core contributors behind wp_image_editor at WordCamp Europe to talk about it. Based in Los Angeles, Mike Schroder works at Dreamhost where he spends his time making sure that WordPress runs as smoothly as possible. He’ll be joined on stage by Marko Heijnen, a developer based in the Netherlands, who is active in WordPress core and the GlotPress project. A great example of transnational collaboration, Mike and Marko will be talking about “Perfect your Images using WordPress.”

In the past, image manipulation in WordPress was an alchemy of mixing GD functions and WordPress functions together to (hopefully) turn out the desired result. In WordPress 3.5+, GD is abstracted out, and a new class, WP_Image_Editor, allows easy manipulation of image files. This lets you perform simple resizing, crops, flips, rotates, and real-time streaming of those results using Imagick or GD. But, that’s not all! You can also easily extend WordPress’ classes to add your own functions, or replace the entire engine with your own.

This session will walk through what’s changed for image manipulation in 3.5, and explain ways you can take advantage of the APIs, both through using them directly and extending them for plugins of your own.

Bram is a freelance software developer and accessibility consultant from Arnhem, the Netherlands. While not coding, tinkering with technology or doing other geeky stuff, he likes to walk with his dog.

Blind from birth, Bram is in the perfect position to explain accessibility related issues in a way that make sense to developers. He’ll be presenting on the topic “Practical WordPress Accessibility.”

In this presentation I would like to give an overview of the current state of WordPress accessibility and why building accessible software is important.

Through some examples I will show how certain accessibility techniques influence how assistive technology is reading a web page.

I’ll give some tips and pointers to theme and plugin developers and finish with a Q&A session.

Some people have expressed interest in the overall demographics of the speakers at WordCamp Europe. Since all of the speakers are now confirmed it’s a great opportunity to share some of them with you. I’ve been coordinating the speaker submissions and selection process. I’ve also had a number of questions about the process which I’m happy to detail.

The Aim of WC Europe

When we started discussing WordCamp Europe, we had a number of aims in mind:
1. To showcase speakers from across Europe at a large-scale WordPress event
2. To bring in overseas speakers that people living in Europe would normally have to travel to the USA to see
3. To provide an environment for creating cross-European collaboration and collaboration with the wider international community.

These were all kept in mind while carrying out the speaker selection.

The Data

Let’s start with a basic table. Below are the demographics of submissions alongside the number of speakers. Note that this is based on where people currently live, as WordCamp Europe constitutes a local WordCamp for anyone living in Europe.

The figures work out as follows:

• European speakers: 75%
• Non-European speakers: 25%

The WordCamp central guidelines around speakers states that “If you aim for at least 80% local/regional and no more than 20% visiting, you’re doing great”. WCEU is pretty close to that, which we’re happy with.

We can also compare the number of people speaking to the number of those applied:

• European submissions: 64%
• Non-European submissions: 36%

Europe had a 64% submission rate and 75% of speakers are from Europe. This means that there is a higher success rate among Europeans as opposed to non-Europeans. This isn’t surprising since we heavily weighted the decision-making process to Europeans.

We did get a lot of submissions from outside of Europe, particularly from the USA. We had 25 submitted from the USA, the next highest was 14 from the Netherlands! It’s great to see that people from all over the world are supportive of WordCamp Europe, and willing to pay the high travel costs required to fly in for the event.

Decision Process

The decision process worked as follows:

• the team constituted 11 people from the following countries: UK, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, France, The Netherlands, Italy
• all members of the team voted anonymously, allocating a Yes, No, or Maybe
• Points were allocated: 2 for yes, 1 for maybe, 0 for no
• Points were tallied.
• as a group we reviewed all of the applications. When two presentations were similar and the speakers of a similar quality, the European candidate was chosen.

Lots of talented people were turned down. It was a difficult process and there was lots of back and forth discussion to get it right.

We think, however, that in the end we’ve got a good balance of speakers, including demographics and topics.

I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments about process and overall demographics. However, it wouldn’t be fair to comment on individuals so please don’t single out speakers for discussion.