Cheers to SiteGround and Hover – our amazing #WCEU after party sponsors

Ah, the WordCamp Europe after party… Each year it’s something else entirely. And this year it’s going to be on a whole other level, so save your Saturday night and stay tuned for the detailed announcement next week.

But right now, we’d like you to join us in saying a huge “Thank you” to the companies that are making the after party possible – our amazing after party sponsors SiteGround and Hover!

They’re not only getting you a drink during the after party, they’ve got a lot of other surprises for you so don’t be shy and give them some love!

Screenshot 2016-06-02 11.24.30

 


SiteGround

SiteGround with over 10 years in the business provides premier managed WordPress hosting! They have servers optimized for ultimate WordPress speed and security, and provide many extras for the WordPress fans – automatic updates for the core WordPress and its plugins, WordPress SuperCacher for speed acceleration, staging tool for the coders and unique WordPress auto installer for the starting users – all crafted in-house by the SiteGround team. They are also involved with the WordPress community speaking, supporting and attending various WordCamps around the world, and by sponsoring WordCamp Europe they want to keep contributing to the amazing WordPress community.


Hover

With hundreds of domain extensions, no heavy-handed upselling and best-in-class support, Hover makes it easy to spend less time on your domains and more time on your big idea.

 

 

 

Introducing the #WCEU focused tracks: “Building a WordPress community”

For the first time this year, WordCamp Europe will have more than two tracks. With the conference expanding almost twice since 2015, we decided to add more content and most of all – experiment with formats and topics.

Our third track is going to be in the beautiful Leopold Museum, just a 2 min walk from Halle E+G, and it will host all our networking activities, three highly targeted, focused content tracks (development, business, and community), and for the first time for an event of this side – unconference (more information coming in the next few days).

Today we’d like to introduce the wonderful speakers who form our “Building your local WordPress community” focused track.

We all know that community matters and people are in the core of why we love WordPress so much. That’s one of the reasons this year we’re introducing the European communities in special blog series.

But we didn’t want to stop there. During our focused track dedicated to community, we’ll hear about the experiences of people from all over the world. Dee Teal (Australia), Kel Santiago-Pilarski (Japan/Poland), Sergey Biryukov (Russia) and Naoko Takano (Japan) all have fascinating stories to share and friendly advice for everyone who’s involved in a local WordPress community.

Welcome to the WordCamp Europe stage!

Dee Teal

Dee Teal is a front end developer building bespoke sites for a wide range of enterprises and in recent times under contract to top quality WordPress agencies. Dee has been using WordPress exclusively since having had her mind blown with its possibilities at her first WordCamp in 2011. Since then she’s been a sold out advocate of WordPress meetups, WordCamps and the WordPress community as a whole. She comes from Australia and speaks on events in her local Melbourn, around Australia and now – on WordCamp Europe.

Dee will talk about Keys to Growing & Developing your WordPress Meetup.

Kel Santiago-Pilarski

From distant Japan comes Kel Santiago-Pilarski. Originally from Philippines and based in Japan since May 2014, she works as Writer ad Evangelist of DigitalCube Inc. – Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner and WordPress Code Poet Consultant. She spoked in quite a few WordCamps (Warsaw, Brisbane, Kansai, Krakow) and is also on a polyglot team who helps localize WordPress. Kel organizes meetups in Japan and international meetups, trainings and hands-on in Singapore and Poland.

She will talk about Contributing to WordPress for Business, Profession & the Community

Sergey Biryukov

Sergey is a freelance WordPress developer since 2006, core contributor since 2010, contributing developer since 2011 and core committer since 2013. He co-founded and was a maintainer of Russian WordPress community since 2007. Besides all that, Sergey helps on support forums, he’s a plugin author and WordCamp Speaker.

He will talk about Managing a local WordPress community

Naoko Takano

Naoko Takano is a Globalizer at Automattic. She is a part of Team Global, which facilitates internationalization and localization of WordPress.com and other products. She has been involved in the Japanese WordPress community since 2003, contributing in the areas of translation, documentation, community including meetup and WordCamp organization.

Naoko will talk about The Story of the Japanese WordPress Community

Community tribe meetup

In addition to the focus track, there’s also a planned Community tribe meet up on Friday morning, so if you’d like to connect with other people around the world that organise local WordPress events, be at the Leopold Museum at 10am.

 

Excited about #WCEU yet? We surely are.

Three weeks to go! See you there.

Oh no! #WCEU tickets are sold out again? Here are a few options

We hate to be telling you “We told you so”, but… we told you so!

And since we really like you, we’d love to see you in Vienna on June 24th and 25th for that tiny conference which will gather 2200 people from 68 countries and will have more than 70 amazing speakers covering a wide range of WordPress topics.

So if, by any chance, you missed the very last batch of WordCamp Europe tickets, here are a few things you can do to join us at the MuseumQuartier:

Find a ticket on the Facebook tickets exchange

We started a ticket exchange in the WordCamp Europe Facebook event where everyone who won’t be able to make the conference, can post their tickets and you can contact them and exchange details. PayPal works great for transactions and all you need to do is ask whoever is transferring the ticket to you, to change their details using the edit link in their confirmation email, with yours. Some people are even offering their spare tickets for free.

Depending on when you acquire the ticket, you might not be able to have a printed badge (you still get one, we’ll just write your name on it) and a t-shirt that’s your size. Your dietary requirements might not be met as well, but you will be there, so it’s all worth it!

Go to the WordCamp Europe Facebook event

Ask on Twitter

Earlier in the day, we asked people who had spare tickets, to tweet about them using the official conference hashtag #WCEU. Check the hashtag or the official WCEU Twitter account, we try to retweet every post about a spare ticket.

Some people found tickets that way! Maybe you can too.

No luck? Grab a Live stream ticket

And if none of this works, you can still grab a Live Stream ticket completely free and enjoy the talks from your sofa or chilling in the park. Then join the social media fun by commenting and posting your thoughts about WordCamp Europe using the official #WCEU hashtag. It won’t be the same, but you will feel included. Because the WordPress community is awesome like that.

Get your free live stream ticket

We hope this helps!

Love,

The WCEU org team

Watch #WCEU wherever you are: get a free live stream ticket!

We know you wish you could be with us on June 24th, but whatever the reason you can’t join us in Vienna is, we understand! Life happens, but that doesn’t mean we’ll let you miss out on all the fun!

All #WCEU sessions will be live streamed for free

We’re extremely happy to be able to offer live streaming for free for a second consecutive year. So on June 24th and 25th just sit back, relax, and tune into the live streaming from Vienna. All three tracks of our schedule will be streamed, giving you a way to switch between talks faster than people who’ll actually be in the MuseumQuartier!WCEU-Vienna-illustration-livestr

Grab your live streaming ticket for free today

Last chance to get a #WCEU ticket

circle-attendee

If you still don’t have a ticket and are desperately looking for one, we have good news! Very very good news!

Thanks to some of our amazing sponsors, speakers, and volunteers, who bought their tickets despite the fact they’re getting a free one, we can now release the last available 64 tickets for #WCEU 2016.

Don’t wait up – we can’t possibly understand why you still don’t have a #WCEU ticket, but if you want one, this is the last opportunity you’ll have.

Get your WordCamp Europe ticket today

 

Welcome our next group of awesome #WCEU speakers

Please join us in welcoming this great group of speakers to the WordCamp Europe 2016 stage! Dion Beetson, Juan Zapata, Konstantin Obenland, Kel Santiago-Pilarski, Joost de Valk, Marieke van de Rakt, Tammie Lister, David Lockie and Andrea Badgley!

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin is a WordPress developer and Core contributor based in Southern California. You might remember him from projects like the new WordPress.org Theme Directory or WordPress 4.3.

Andrea Badgley

Andrea Badgley is a writer and Happiness Engineer with Automattic. By publishing regularly since 2012, she has built a community of close to 20,000 followers on her personal blog.

David Lockie

David is a WordPress specialist and agency Founder & Director. He has experience building a WordPress business from the ground up, having grown his agency Pragmatic from just himself to over 25 people over the course of 3 years.

Joost de Valk & Marieke van de Rakt

Joost is the founder and CEO of Yoast, a geek by background having built his first website in 1994 at 12 years old, he became a marketeer by trade. At Yoast he combined the two, leading to the very successful Yoast SEO plugin which is now available on several platforms.
Marieke holds a PhD in social sciences, has done research and taught classes at several universities before joining Joost to become responsible for strategy at Yoast 3 years ago. She has written 4 books since joining Yoast, created several online courses and has spent a ton of time researching what leads to success online, focussing mostly on content and copywriting.

Dion Beetson

Dion is a full stack software development leader based in Sydney, Australia. Being a software engineer at heart, he’s architected and lead the development and roll out of some of the largest e-commerce and CMS migrations within Australia.

Kel Santiago-Pilarski

Kel is from the Philippines and has been based in Japan since May 2014 working as the Writer + Evangelist of DigitalCube Inc. – Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner, WordPress Code Poet Consultant, first in Japan & all of Asia.

She’s also on the Polyglots team who helps localize WordPress.

Tammie Lister

Tammie works at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. She has a varied background including psychology, design, front-end development and user experience. She is a contributor to WordPress and passionate about Open Source.

Juan Zapata

Juan has been working with WordPress since version 2.9 and has seen it evolve since then to what it is now. Currently, he works in news corp Australia where he’s migrated their main newspapers to WordPress VIP ( news.com.au, theaustralian.com.au, foxsports.com.au within other 13 newspapers ).

Say hello to our next group of WCEU speakers

The full schedule is online and in the next couple of weeks we’ll continue to introduce our amazing lineup. Today we’re extremely happy to welcome eight new speakers – Rian Rietveld, Marcos Schratzenstaller, Thomas Kräftner, Gary Pendergast, Ivelina Dimova, Lucijan Blagonic, Joe Hoyle and Mika Epstein.


Rian Rietveld

Rian Rietveld is a self employed WordPress front and backend developer, specialized in web accessibility. She is also part of the Make WordPress Accessible Team.

Marcos Schratzenstaller

Working at Rainmaker Digital as a SysAdmin focused on WordPress hosting, Marcos is a System administrator focused on WordPress hosting, developer in languages: Python, Bash, PHP, C/C++, Informix 4GL, Java, HTML, JavaScript, C#, Visual C++ (with large experience in this field) with large knowledge in databases (SQL and No-SQL).

Thomas Kräftner

Thomas Kräftner is an interactive developer with a degree in Information Design. While having a clear focus on web development, he always keeps his mind open and has a good understanding of a lot of surrounding fields.

Gary Pendergast

Gary is a WordPress, web and music geek who writes poetry with Automattic. He’s been know to commit random things to WordPress Core, just to see what would happen.

Ivelina Dimova

WordPress developer working at CrowdFavorite where we create web solutions for big enterprise companies. I am more focused on back-end development and passionate about version control systems, deployment and server administration tools.

Lucijan Blagonić

Lucijan has 12 years of experience working on the web, including planning, prototyping, designing and coding standards–compliant — semantic websites and interfaces. He is a strong advocate of responsive design, building mobile–first interfaces with usability and accessibility in mind.

Joe Hoyle

Joe Hoyle is the co-founder of Human Made where he heads up their development efforts. He’s been working on the WordPress REST API team for almost a year, and is dedicated to getting it shipped in WordPress Core.

Mika Epstein

Mika (実佳) Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Rogue. Working for DreamHost, specializing in WordPress hosting (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), Mika helps make WordPress and hosting better for everyone.

Introducing the WordCamp Europe 2016 schedule

Seven weeks to WordCamp Europe 2016! We can’t wait to meet you all in Vienna for three days of everything WordPress!

The Schedule

Today, we’re excited to share the full schedule for WordCamp Europe 2016 and some interesting speaker demographics. During the next several weeks we’ll keep introducing our speakers so you get a chance to know them better before meeting them in Vienna.

The applications and the selection process

Screenshot 2016-05-05 11.32.26

We received 227 applications from 33 countries

 

The overwhelming number of applications we received this year are making us extremely happy because they show a trend of more and more people stepping up to share their experience with others, and on a bigger stage.

We received 227 applications from 33 countries in 5 continents (121 from Europe, 85 from North and South America, 12 from Asia, 9 from Australia and NZ). We also received twice the number of applications from women compared to WordCamp Europe 2014 and 2015.

Our selection process included internal voting within the 18-person WordCamp Europe team followed by a careful selection of the final speakers shortlist with topic, gender, and location diversity in mind.

The final selection

WordCamp Europe, the most important WordPress event on this continent.

 

We are proud that we will have 73 speakers from all over the world on the WordCamp Europe stage covering topics from beginner to advanced development, design, accessibility, business, big media, hiring, community and personal growth.

Our final speaker demographics: 73 speakers from 20 countries. 43 from Europe, 21 from North America, 1 from South America, 5 from Australia & NZ, 2 from Asia, 1 from Africa.

There will be 22 women and 51 men on stage in three tracks in Halle E, Halle G and the Leopold Museum at the Vienna Museum Quartier.

Focused tracks in the Leopold Museum

get

There will be three thematic tracks in the big hall at the Leopold museum, dedicating half a day each to “Introduction to WordPress development”, “Running a WordPress business” and “Running a local WordPress community”.

Unconference

On Saturday, after lunch, the Leopold’s big hall will host a Barcamp – a format which we’re excited to experiment with and which will give you the opportunity to get on the #WCEU stage for a flash talk.

Networking events

Last year we gave networking events during the conference a try. Based on the feedback, attendees enjoyed those a lot, so we’re bringing them back in 2016. There are many scheduled networking events around the official schedule to let you connect with others – we will have tribe meetups and speed networking in the Leopold museum. Stay tuned for the specific announcement.

To keep up with the most recent updates from the WCEU team, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and to subscribe to receive news by email!

Love,

The Organising team

Give a warm welcome to Sucuri as a #WCEU Administrator sponsor

Please welcome our next Administrator sponsor – Sucuri, and join us in saying a huge thank you to the Sucuri team for their continuous support of the WordPress community in Europe.



140710690 - 070715_Sucuri_LightBackground_NoTagline_XLarge


Sucuri builds the best and most affordable cloud-based security technologies and service that every website, regardless of platform, can employ. They offer to website owners the most concise security resource on the web for the security of their website[s].

Don’t miss their booth in Vienna, drop by, check out their awesome services or just say hello to their team.

 

Meet the third group of #WCEU speakers!

There are less than 9 weeks left to WordCamp Europe and we’re excited to welcome our next group of WordCamp Speakers – Gábor Hojtsy, Lesley Molecke, Anna Ladoshkina, Pascal Birchler, Morten Rand-Hendriksen and Maurizio Pelizzone.

Gábor HojtsyGábor_Hojtsy(2)

The #WCEU team is extremely happy to welcome Gábor Hojtsy, one of the lead Drupal developers, to the WordCamp Europe 2016 stage.

Gábor is an open source enthusiast and contributor, most active as a Drupal developer, working with and on the open source project itself at Acquia. He was the release maintainer for Drupal 6, the initiator and lead of localize.drupal.org, Drupal’s software localization site and lead to the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative.

He started off contributing to Open Source in 2000 when he became an active contributor to the PHP Documentation team and became the lead to that team and the lead to the PHP.net website team for years. He is the technical editor of the first Hungarian PHP developer book, he’s led courses on web technologies and co-organized various PHP and generic web development conferences in Hungary.

He started working with and on Drupal in 2003, and became devoted to the multilingual functionality and sometimes the lack thereof. He is an active contributor ever since and has co-organizer of DrupalCon Szeged 2008 and Drupal Dev Days 2014.

He’s a father of an amazing boy, loves reading non-fiction and is very passionate about singing, music and amateur acting, especially when these three are all combined.

Lesley Molecke

Lesley Molecke

Lesley Molecke

Lesley is the co-founder of boutique WordPress agency, Cornershop Creative, which focuses on helping nonprofit and small business customers set and meet their goals online. She’s been working on the web since she was in high school and ran her own small web design shop before she could drive.

Prior to founding Cornershop Creative, she managed enterprise-level CMS rollouts for both the City of Albuquerque and the Albuquerque Public Schools (one of the largest districts in the US) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Lesley and her co-founders have turned a pipe dream of a business into a reality that employs 10 remote employees and helps more than 100 nonprofit customers each year.

Pascal Birchler

Pascal Birchler

Pascal Birchler

Pascal is a 22-year-old student and web developer from Switzerland. He contributes to WordPress whether it is by organising local events, or through direct core contributions.

His passion is to help other people, whether it’s by cooking, building awesome websites, or by blogging. He’s been working with WordPress for years and he’s involved with both the German-speaking and the international community.

Pascal received commit access to WordPress core after leading the embeds feature plugin included in WordPress 4.4.

He had a great time at WordCamp Europe 2015 and is coming back in 2016 to share his experience about contributing to WordPress with others and inspire people to do the same.

Anna Ladoshkina

Anna Ladoshkina

Anna Ladoshkina

Anna has been developing websites on WordPress for NGOs in Russia since 2006 as a freelancer.

Apart from that, Anna is working with te-st.ru team (that’s open educational project for NGOs) to promote web-technologies and WordPress in particular for NGOs in Russia. Her team creates events and educational materials to help Russian charities become more efficient on the web.

Anna is a self-educated specialist and used to adopt new techniques and tools on her own.

Anna will share her experience on how to start using modern tools when you are developing websites (not themes of plugins), how to manage such projects and how they are different.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand Hendriksen

Morten Rand Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a senior staff author at Lynda.com, a LinkedIn Company, with 60+ courses published.

When not creating training materials for Lynda.com, Morten teaches Instructional Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, co-organizes the Vancouver WordPress Meetup Group, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects.

In his spare time, he reads sci-fi and philosophy, tries to find time to play guitar, and wears out his dance shoes on the ballroom floor.

Maurizio Pelizzone

Maurizio Pelizzone

Maurizio Pelizzone

Maurizio Pelizzone is a WordPress Developer from Italy. He discovered WordPress ten years ago and since then he’s used if for a wide range of personal and professional projects.

Today his web agency archives a lot of beautiful WordPress sites, made in collaboration with many freelancers, designers and communication agencies.

His free time is dedicated to his wife and son, he loves taking shots with his reflex camera and playing board games with his friends.

Don’t want to miss any #WCEU news? Subscribe for updates and follow #WCEU onTwitter and Facebook to keep up with all event announcements and to share the love!