Let’s say a big “Thank You” for Yoast supporting WordCamp Europe 2015 as a Administrator sponsor.
Yoast is the company behind hugely successful plugins such as WordPress SEO by Yoast and Google Analytics by Yoast. With over 5 million users worldwide, Yoast services an ever growing group of customers which they service with premium plugins, ebooks and website reviews. Being a Dutch company, Yoast is very proud to sponsor this WordCamp Europe.
In an effort to look outside the WordPress island and get fresh ideas from other communities, we have 4 prominent speakers from outside the WordPress community you’re going to meet at WordCamp Europe 2015. Today we want to introduce Amelia Andersdotter and have her share some of her experience and background with you before her talk in Seville. Amelia has been a Member of the European Parliament. She currently engages in privacy and data protection advocacy in Sweden.
Photo: https://ameliaandersdotter.eu
Hey Amelia, could you introduce yourself in a few words?
I’m 27 years old and a student of mathematics. My side-gig is improving privacy and data protection for all. I used to be Member of the European Parliament.
What is your WordCamp Europe talk going to be about? What should people expect?
Together with Anders Jensen-Urstad, I’m developing methods to make privacy-preserving websites. We’ve split the task into ideological (like, why is it even important? what’s the law?) and what do we do technically? Our work is divided so that I mostly know the law and the intentions behind the law, and Anders is very good at giving the political ideas a technical form. So expect both practical and ideological!
What type of work did you do in the European Parliament?
I was a Member of the European Parliament, which means your formal duty is to vote on legislative proposals and enact them as laws. In a broader sense it means talking and listening a lot. I worked on telecoms policy, copyright policy (of course!) and privacy policy. Actually a lot on intersections between technical standards and legislation – it’s an area poorly understood by both political and technical communities.
What are the most common data privacy mistakes people make when creating websites?
Saying it’s impossible. There’s a very defeatist spirit around privacy concerns on the web. We hope to show that defeatism is not only unsexy, but also uncalled for.
How are data privacy laws created in Europe? Could you give us some insights into the process?
Data privacy is a human right, but human rights thinking doesn’t usually dominate people’s day-to-day concerns. It’s something we expect to “just work”. So legislators aren’t always mindful of how they implement these values in laws: laws end up unclear, or ambiguous.
There’s also a conflation with data security. But security might mean that a public administration or company is able to reliably exert control over a person. Data privacy means that the person can exercise control over such control. We can’t solve privacy and data protection only by security, we must also have the will to, say, decentralise power over how people are influenced.
Somehow, there’s also a fear that citizens, users or customers simply don’t know what’s good for them. In this way, politicians and system administrators are actually a bit similar: they do a lot of things and make a lot of rules to protect people from themselves. I guess somewhere I have an ambition to promote the view that we can allow people to make choices, even if those choices aren’t always optimal, because diversity is strength and anyway new and good things don’t happen if we homogenize everyone all the time.
What are you currently occupied with? What are your latest projects?
Me and Anders trying to make guidelines for public sector bodies on how to build privacy friendly websites. For the citizen, visiting a public authority, or even a company where one is customer, without telling lots of third-parties about it should be a given. We’re trying to show how it’s technically possible to achieve stuff that most people would anyway principally agree with, and to make it easier for public authorities to live up to a mission many of them feel committed to in either case: preserving democratic values and building good spaces for citizenship.
Anything else you’d like to share?
On a completely unrelated note, everyone should care about the European copyright reform. There has never been a better time to approach legislators in Europe about copyright reform than now. The anti-reform lobby is very strong and we may end up with a considerably more difficult and strict legislation unless there is balance in the messaging received by legislators.
Thank you!
Make sure you catch Amelia and Anders’ session “Building Privacy-Friendly Websites” on Saturday morning, June 27th.
For more speaker insights and interviews, follow #WCEU on Twitter, Facebook and Google + .
We’re very happy and honoured to welcome Jetpack as a Super Admin sponsor of WordCamp Europe 2015.
Thank you for your support!
Everyone, you should definitely stop by their table at #WCEU and say “Hi”.
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It’s just over a month until WordCamp Europe! All over Europe, the organising team is working on all of those tiny details that make for a perfect WordCamp. Today we’re excited to share one of the big details with you – the schedule!
We’ve got two days packed full of WordPress knowledge across two tracks and a total of 43 speakers from around the world. But don’t worry if you can’t decide – every session will be recorded and uploaded to WordPress.tv so you can catch up after the event and re-watch your favourite sessions over and over again.
For the first time at WordCamp Europe we’re introducing a new session form: the short talks (10min), thanks to which WCEU attendees will be able to get WordPress insights and know-how from 12 more speakers. The new format was introduced due to the huge amount of great quality applications we received and our commitment to give the #WCEU stage to as many great ideas as possible.
Europe is represented by 29 speakers from 12 different countries. We have three speakers from Asia, one from Australia and one from Africa. Ten of our speakers come from North America.
In an effort to look outside the WordPress island, get fresh ideas and learn from other communities, we have 4 prominent speakers from outside the WordPress community.
If you haven’t yet, now’s a great time to buy your ticket because when they’re gone they’re gone, and who wants to miss out on three days of WordPress in the gorgeous setting of Sevilla? There are less than 100 tickets left, 90% of all tickets are already gone.
Don’t forget that we have some awesome hotel deals for attendees: you can get a room at the Barcelo, our beautiful event venue, from just €85 per night.
To stay up to date with everything that’s happening with WordCamp Europe 2015, follow us on Twitter.
Falta un poco más de un mes para WordCamp Europa 2015. Por toda Europa, el equipo organizador está trabajando en todos los detalles que hacen una WordCamp perfecta. Hoy estamos muy contentos de compartir un gran detalle con vosotros: el programa.
Serán 2 días llenos de conocimiento acerca de WordPress, en 2 pistas y un total de 43 ponentes procedentes de todo el mundo. No te preocupe si no puedes decidirte, todas las sesiones serán grabadas y subidas a WordPress.tv para que pueda ver todas las sesiones una y otra vez.
Por 1a vez en WordCamp Europa hemos introducido una nueva tipo de sesión: charlas cortas (10 minutos), gracias a la cual los asistentes a WCEU podrán obtener una amplia perspectiva de WordPress y el know-how de 12 ponentes más. Este nuevo formato se introdujo debido a la enorme cantidad de propuestas recibidas y el compromiso para que participen en #WCEU todos los que tienen grandes ideas.
Europa está representada por 29 ponentes de 12 países. Hay 3 ponentes de Asia, 1 ponente de Australia y 1 ponente de Africa; además 10 ponentes proceden de América del Norte.
Buscando fuera de la comunidad WordPress, con el objetivo de obtener nuevas ideas y aprender de otros colectivos, hay 4 ponentes de otras comunidades.
Si aún no tienes tu entrada, ahora es el mejor momento para comprarla porque cuando se hayan terminado no habrá más y ¿Quién quiere perderse la oportunidad de tres días de WordPress en el magnífico entorno de Sevilla? Quedan menos de 100 entradas, 90% de todas las entradas ya tienen dueño.
No olvides que tienes algunas ofertas increíbles de hoteles: puedes conseguir una habitación en el Barcelo, donde se celebra el evento, desde sólo € 85 por noche.
Para estar al día con todo lo que está pasando con Europa WordCamp 2015, sígenos en Twitter.
Drew Jaynes is a web engineer from the USA, working for 10up. He’s heavily involved in the WordPress community, contributing to the core, documentation, and meta teams. He’s a core docs committer, and has contributed to every major WordPress release since v3.3. In 2015, he was named the WordPress 4.2 release lead.
Drew is also one of our WordCamp Europe speakers this year (he’s first talk in Europe, yay!), so we’re excited to give you the opportunity to get to know him better before meeting him in person in Seville.
Hey Drew, could you introduce yourself to everyone?
Hi, I’m Drew. I live in Denver, Colorado and work remotely as a web engineer at 10up and as a docs committer for WordPress core.
How did you get involved with WordPress? When did you make your first contribution?
I first got involved with WordPress about six years ago when I built a news site for my college newspaper. It wasn’t until about two years later that I really started to get involved in contributing to WordPress core, first with a simple patch and ticket (I was super intimidated) and my contributions sort of blossomed from there. I’ve been doing it ever since and I love it.
Could you tell us a bit more about the work the teams you are involved with do?
I recently lead the 4.2 release for core (the 10th release I’ve contributed to!) and I also contribute to the docs, meta, and support teams. Since the meta team pretty much supports anything having to do with WordPress.org, several of the projects I’ve been working on lately have actually been what are considered hybrids. The developer hub, for instance, is a hybrid of the docs and meta teams, just as the inline documentation effort I’ve been leading as the core docs committer sees contributions from both the docs and core teams.
The WordPress Docs team
What are your lessons learned from leading the 4.2 release that other release leads should follow?
Probably the biggest lesson I learned in leading the 4.2 release is that it’s all about staying organized. It’s amazing how much stress you can avoid by simply being organized and aware of all of the moving parts. I had a blast leading 4.2, and would absolutely do it again!
What was the most challenging thing about being a release lead?
The most challenging aspect of leading a release is definitely working with volunteers. WordPress, like many open source projects, is entirely dependent on volunteers. They don’t have to be there and they don’t necessarily have to do what they volunteer for. The best we can do is promote a sense of pride and community in getting contributors to stick around. Working within that dynamic is always a challenge because you have to be careful about not upsetting the balance while still trying to meet your goals.
What is your WordCamp Europe talk about? What will people learn from you?
My WordCamp Europe talk is all about examining the new user experience of setting up various areas of WordPress. I ran two sets of user tests, first with new users on setting up a variety of things in WordPress, then again using a proof of concept plugin that guides new users through the process. I doubt the results of the tests will that surprising to most people, but it’s worth having the conversation anyway. As we continue to try to drive adoption of WordPress, first impressions are everything, and we can certainly improve on it.
Anything we missed asking you and you’d like to share?
This will be the first time I’m presenting overseas, something I’ve been working toward for the last couple of years. So go easy on me!
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Make sure you add Drew Jaynes’ talk “Getting WordPress Out of its Own Way: A NUX Case Study” on your #wceu calendar!
For the full schedule and more speaker highlights, follow #WCEU on Twitter, Facebook and Google +
This post completes our speaker roster for WordCamp Europe. We’re thrilled to have such talented people taking to the stage for WordCamp Europe in June. Watch this space for the schedule which we’ll be releasing over the coming weeks and the speaker highlights that will let you in on some of our speakers’ WordPress stories and will give you more insights into their talks at WordCamp Europe in Seville.
Pascal Birchler is a 21-year-old computer science student and web developer from Switzerland. He contributes to WordPress wherever he can, whether it’s by organizing the local meetups, WordCamp Switzerland, or by writing on his blog SpinPress. Follow him on twitter @swissspidy.
Jeni Tennison is Technical Director of the Open Data Institute. After having originally trained as a psychologist and knowledge engineer and gaining a PhD in collaborative ontology development from the University of Nottingham, she went on to work as an independent consultant and practitioner, specialising in open data publishing and consumption, including XML, JSON and linked data APIs. Before joining the ODI, Jeni was the technical architect and lead developer for legislation.gov.uk. Within the wider UK public sector, she worked on the early linked data work on data.gov.uk helping to engineer new standards for the publication of statistics as linked data. She continues her work within the UK’s public sector as a member of both the UK Government Linked Data Group and the Open Data User Group.
Mark Forrester is the proud Capetonian co-founder of WooThemes. From humble beginnings building commercial themes to helping steer the WooCommerce ship, and the team that empowers 24% of all online shops, Mark is passionate about WordPress and community building. He’s also a husband, father, photographer, football fanatic and wannabe surfer.
Thijs de Valk joined team Yoast in December 2012. He is currently Marketing & Sales Manager, which makes him responsible for the flow of sales and improvements in the conversion department. At Yoast, Thijs is doing website and conversion reviews, working on support and performing conversion optimization (A/B) tests on yoast.com.
Lilyana Yakimova is the Marketing Director at WordPress hosting specialist SiteGround.com. Joining the company since its very foundation, Lilyana has led all marketing and communication strategies of the company to date. Effectively communicating SiteGround strengths, Lilyana’s vision has helped grow the company from a single client to an international business and build the strong brand that SiteGround is today.
Ilona Filipi is the co-founder and MD of an Innovative WordPress Agency Moove specialising in the planning, production, and post-launch support of bespoke WordPress websites. She blogs at IlonaFilipi.com about the business side of running a WordPress agency.
David Aguilera got his PhD in Computer Science (he specialized in Quality in Conceptual Modeling) and co-founded Nelio Software, a start-up focused on offering WordPress-related services. He’s the lead developer of Nelio A/B Testing, a split testing service for WordPress.
There are less than 100 tickets left, so get your #WCEU ticket today. Follow #WCEU on Twitter, Facebook and Google +, to stay on top of things.
Sign up for the Contributor Day at WordCamp Europe 2015 on Sunday, June 28!
Did you know that? And not all of them are developers or designers. All you need to start giving back to the project is to know and love WordPress.
Contributor days are a great way to learn how to do that. In addition Contributor days around global WordCamps give you the opportunity to meet and work alongside seasoned contributors from all teams as a lot of them attend.
We encourage you to take part of Contributor day especially if you have never contributed before and you’re looking for a way to get started.
If you’ve never contributed to WordPress before, WordCamp Europe would be a great place to start. There are plenty of opportunities for everyone to help the projects, such as:
See? There’s plenty of room for everyone, and we’re more than happy to welcome newcomers to each of the WordPress Contributors team!
If you’re not sure which team is best for you, check out the Make WordPress website and all of the active teams.
Don’t forget your laptop and charger – you’ll need them during the contributing process.
Sign up for (or make sure that you already have):
Currently the main communication medium for contributors is Slack, so download a desktop version or use the web one with your credentials.
If you have any questions regarding the Contributors day, reach out to any organizer or use the #wceu hashtag on Twitter.
If you’re an experienced WordPress contributor, join the Contributor Day! We are looking for more mentors for the people starting out, and your experience would be a great asset for the day.
We will announce the main team leaders soon, but if you are interested in helping out with a specific team, let us know.
The Contributor Day will start at 11am at the Barceló Gran Hotel Renacimiento and we will wrap up at 6pm. Make sure that you are present at 11am when we will introduce the team leaders and the room that each team would be using for brainstorming and work.
Lunch would be available, so don’t forget to mark your dietary requirements (if any) in the form below.
In addition to the contributing teams, workshops would also be given at a separate room at the hotel. Nothing is set in stone and you will be able to switch teams or attend some of the workshops.
Fill in the form below to secure your place. The places are limited so act fast and reserve your slot!
http://wceurope.polldaddy.com/s/wordcamp-europe-2015-contributor-day
See you there!
We have another group of speakers to introduce you to today. They come from across the WordPress community and around the world. We hope you’re as excited as we are about seeing them in Seville in just a few months!
Aaron Jorbin is a Polyhistoric man of the web. Currently a WordPress guest committer and Technical Architect At Conde Nast. He is an ally to many and knows the world is better with Bow Ties and Whisky. He has pent the last 5 years as a core contributor to WordPress including the last ~6 months as a committer. One of his passions is keeping WordPress a “gateway drug” to both web development and open source. His passion for education extends beyond technology. He also organises an educational simulation of international relations for 1500 university students from around the world.
Tenko Nikolov is the Chief Executive Officer of WordPress hosting specialist SiteGround.com. With more than 9 years of experience in the hosting industry, Tenko has been successfully managing and overseeing SiteGround’s development to date. Joining the company in its very dawn, he started as a Support Team member but soon became Support Team manager, then VP of technology, and later was appointed CEO of the company.
Silvan Hagen is co-founder of the UX and WordPress agency required+ and one of the organisers for WordCamp Switzerland. He helps his clients to build long-lasting and maintainable solutions, using UX to in the process of building WordPress solutions and plugins. Silvan keeps his mind open with travelling. He surfs and snowboards, takes photographs, and builds self-sustaining permaculture gardens.
Wouter Groenewold is a social geek, on the sharp on the edge of humanity and innovation who is always looking for ways to make technology available and more refined for every person.
Juliette Reinders Folmer is an independent business consultant with wicked IT skills. You might encounter her as a speaker at PHP or WordPress conferences. She is a Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) and has been contributing to numerous open source projects since the beginning of this century.
Eric Mann is a seasoned web developer with experience in languages from JavaScript to Ruby to C#. He has been building websites of all shapes and sizes for the better part of a decade and continues to experiment with new technologies and techniques. Eric is a Lead Web Engineer at 10up (http://10up.com) where he focuses on developing high-end web solutions powered by WordPress.
Daniel Pataki builds things for WordPress and writes about them. He is the editor of the WordPress section on Smashing Magazine and he writes for WPMU DEV, Hongkiat, Tuts+ and other websites regularly. His goal is to make great tools that enhance the lives of people who use them.
Bryce Adams is a nomadic coder working for WooThemes.com. He loves open source, building useful products and interacting with the community! In his spare time, he’s either travelling the world and attending WordPress events or building small start-ups that try to push the boundaries of everyday WordPress development.
In a series of short interviews in the weeks before WordCamp Europe we’ll introduce some of the speakers you’ll have a chance to meet at the event.
Ryan McCue is a WordPress developer from Australia and might be to this day the youngest WordPress developer to start contributing to core (his first patch was committed when he was only 14!). Nowadays, at the much more mature age of 21, Ryan leads one of the projects that will secure the future growth of WordPress as an application framework – the JSON REST API project. He works for Human Made as the lead developer for Happytables.com.
Ryan will tell us more about the REST API project during his WordCamp Europe talk, but before that happens, let’s learn a bit more about him and his WordPress origin story.
How did you get involved with WordPress?
Way back when I was in school, before the days where computers were locked down and you couldn’t run anything, I got involved with PortableApps.com. The whole point of the project was essentially to get various programs (like Firefox) running off USB drives so you could take everything with you
It also happened to be my first open source project, and my first introduction to working with other people on open source. I managed to get some free site hosting from someone else involved with the project and decided I needed a blog. I tried out a bunch of them, but turns out they all sucked compared to WP 🙂
How old were you back then? There are rumours you created your first patch at 14?
I was actually about 11 or 12 when I first got involved with PortableApps, so I was working on open source before I discovered WP. I also had some homegrown plugins and themes before I started patching core. But 14 for my first core patch sounds about right. The whole reason I got started with PortableApps was so I could play games at school instead of doing work 😉
Do you remember how you got involved with contributing to WordPress?
I think the first version of WP that I used was in the 2.x, and same for the patch itself I suspect.
I’m not entirely sure what my first patch was, although probably it was a small CSS or JS change. I do remember replacing the colour picker in WP around the same time with Farbtastic, though, which I think was my first major-ish patch. To date though, I’m not entirely sure how many substantial patches I’ve contributed, although I suspect it’s low. That said, I’m personally responsible for huge parts of core, since I’m also the maintainer of SimplePie, which used to be ~10% of the core code (although I suspect it’s lower now).
So apart from WordPress (and your side job at Human Made) what do you do with your time?
I like to joke that working at Human Made is my spare time, since I somehow find a way to fill most of my time working on open source projects. 😉
Seriously though, I’m a bit of a transport nut, so I spend lots of time arguing with friends and family over things like bus routes, which is pretty nerdy. I’m an avid gamer too, so I’ve been super enjoying playing Cities: Skylines recently – definitely recommend it!
Thanks! So nowadays you head the Json REST API project. Could you give us a quick overview of the project?
The REST API is basically a way to get at the actual content of your site in a machine-readable way. The idea with this is to let plugin and theme developers create richer, more responsive websites, as well as helping to improve mobile apps’ access.
Right now, WP has a system to do this, called the XML-RPC API, but it’s a pain to use for developers. Not only that, but it suffers from problems with mobile devices due to how inefficient it is
With the REST API, we’re already seeing developers taking the ball and running with it. The AppPresser team has developed a system to create custom mobile apps for your site, news organisations like Wired and The New York Times are using it to connect their newsroom into WordPress, and theme developers are using it to supercharge their themes
It’s now a feature plugin, what are the plans for getting it into core?
It’s a slow-but-steady process that we’re working on, talking back and forth with the core team and working out the best way to get this thing in. We just pushed out the first beta of our new 2.0 version, which is the result of the input that we’ve had from core developers, as well as developers using version 1 out in the wild. We’ve got further things we still want to do here, and we’ll be working even closer with the core team during the 4.3 cycle.
Who else is working with you on the project?
Myself and Rachel Baker are the project leads, with Daniel Bachhuber and Joe Hoyle as our main contributing developers for version 2. All up, we have 53 contributors to the project, which totally blows me away
So if anyone wants to get involved, how should they do it?
The best way to get involved is to listen in to our twice-weekly meetings in the #core-restapi room on Slack. We hold these at 23:00 UTC on Mondays and Wednesdays. We’ll quite often jump into a Google Hangout as well to work through issues, and of course everyone is welcome to join these as well (we’ll link them in the room)
The day-to-day development takes place over on GitHub, and we use the issue tracker there heavily.
So what should people expect from your talk at WordCamp Europe?
At #WCEU, I’ll be speaking about how you can use the REST API in projects starting right now, and explore some of the ways that people are already using it today. It’ll be general enough for most people to understand it, but obviously it helps to have a technical background, and it’s probably most useful for those people as well.
See you there!
Make sure you mark your schedule for Ryan McCue’s talk on the REST API.
More speaker highlights coming soon. Don’t forget to follow WordCamp Europe on Twitter (and look for the #wceu hashtag, too), Facebook, andGoogle +, to stay on top of things.
Bought your ticket yet? They’re going fast.
WordCamp Europe is fast approaching, and we’ve got another six speakers for you to get all excited about seeing.
Rian Rietveld is a WordPress back- & front-end developer. Web accessibility is important to her, so she is also part of the Make WordPress Accessible team.
Mika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. Working for DreamHost, specializing in WordPress hosting (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, trains everyone in why WordPress makes your life better, and still finds time to slash unanswered WordPress.org forum threads by night and wrangle plugins by day. A self-taught guru on Multisite and .htaccess, she has a passion for writing and technology and blogs regularly about it.
Adrian Zumbrunnen is a User Experience Designer, Writer, Speaker and Coffee Enthusiast working in the beautiful city of Zurich. He creates memorable product and communication experiences by consequently putting the user in the center of all creative efforts. Formerly at iA, he’s now attempting to create a new editing experience for the web with a new tool called FrontKit.
Joan Boluda an Online Marketing Consultant, teacher, podcaster, speaker, and writer from the beautiful city of Barcelona. He runs the Mataró WordPress Meetup, and is a co-organizer of the Barcelona WordPress Meetup and the Barcelona WordPress English Meetup. He is also one of the organizers and speaker of WordCamp Barcelona. While not evangelizing WordPress or podcasting, you can find him teaching Online Marketing Strategy at ESADE Executive Education programs.
Jordi Cabot is an ICREA Research Professor leading a software research lab at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC University, Spain). He is also the co-founder of Nelio Software, a company specialized in A/B testing services and site migrations for WordPress.
Marina Pape grew up in Cape Town, studying Psychology and English at UCT, and worked in advertising and the non-profit sector for four years followed by four years helping to grow Yuppiechef.com, South Africa’s leading eCommerce store. In 2014 an international move and bit of luck led her to WooThemes.com and down the WordPress rabbit hole and she now enjoys a typical mixed marketer’s bag day-to-day – including social media, email marketing, brand management and copywriting.
Get your #WCEU ticket today if you haven’t already, and follow #WCEU on Twitter, Facebook and Google +, to stay on top of things.