Category Archives: Announcements

See you in 2016 (or may be at our next meetup)

We are back from WordCamp Pune and had a great time there!!

If you did notice WordCamp Mumbai getting mentioned there a lot (Thanks Saurabh) and was wondering what’s really happening. I have the insider scoop for you 😉

But this is also an end post for WordCamp Mumbai 2015 of sorts so I have some info to share with you about this WordCamp before I go on to the next one.

Money Matters First:

So we’d like you to know how much we spent and on what. This helps us maintain transparency and also if there something that we are paying too much for you can always point it out, who doesn’t love saving!

So here’s our Statement of Accounts

Watch them again:

We have uploaded the session videos here on WordPress.tv

Please Note: that videos get moderated before going live and may take time, so please be patient if a certain speaker video isn’t up yet or you could pester us about the same as well.

Now to WordCamp Mumbai 2016

We are in the initial stages of pre-planning, figuring out our budget, venue and getting them approved before we move forward.

In 2016, one of our Organizers from last year Sanat Hegde will be leading the charge, and I will be stepping back only from being Lead Organizer and will continue being part of the WordCamp. It’s important to note that Sanat was an attendee at WordCamp Mumbai 2014, attended meetups thereafter, joined our organizing team last year and now is leading WordCamp Mumbai. We have built an open group here which is always looking for volunteers to help with meetups, workshops and WordCamp, So join in here.

If you are interested in Sponsoring, Speaking or most importantly Volunteering; you can subscribe to our Blog here, as we will be making announcements about the same there.

If you really feel that there is something you need to ask us about, you can just go ahead and use the form next the subscribe option.

Meetups are more fun!

While WordCamp is this big ticket event, Meetups happen regularly (at least one a month). Meetups are a great place to meet fellow WordPress Enthusiasts and make life long friends.

We prefer using volunteers who attend meetups as we are more confident when we meet people face to face, regularly.  If you would like to speak at the WordCamp, but aren’t very confident, you can also get in touch with us about speaking at the meetup, as a trial.

So Signup for a meetup here.

BTW did I mention that this is WordPress Chapter Program Meetup, which means anyone can organize a WordPress Meetup.

Find yourself “WP Helpers” at WordCamp Mumbai

Often at a WordCamp you are confused whom to ask for help or how to ask for help about WordPress. Sometimes because there are many experts, some might feel their questions are too basic or too simple to be asked, some might just be shy to ask questions at a Q &A part of the speaker’s session.

This is why we are introducing WP Helpers at the WordCamp.

What are WP Helpers?

Many times you want some WordPress help on a one on one basis from an expert who has used WordPress for a long time. So people who are volunteering for helping out people with their WordPress queries at the WordCamp are called WP Helpers. 🙂

How to find WP Helpers at WordCamp Mumbai?

There are many experts at this WordCamp. Many of them are our speakers and also a lot of people who work on WordPress for a living. We will be co-ordinating various experts at the venue. Just ask any of the volunteers or the designated co-ordinator for help and they will answer your questions themselves or find someone who can.

How do I become a WP Helper?

When you register in the morning, just mention how you use WordPress and would like to be an WP Helper. We already have a co-ordinator who will handle and get the right queries to you.

Our Last List of Confirmed Speakers!

We announced three lists of speakers for WordCamp Mumbai 2015. Today, I am announcing the final list of speakers.

Here are the seven we are proud to announce.

Roshnikumar Yambem

Roshnikumar is an open-source fundamentalist. He is the founder of Globizs Web Solutions Pvt Ltd
which has been developing websites on WordPress since 2006. They have developed more than 200 WordPress websites along with a few dozen websites for Government of Manipur.

Speaker Session: WordPress Security – OWASP TOP 10 Protection

Akshay Raje

Akshay discovered WordPress in 2008 and has been in love with it since then. He started moonlighting on small client projects and custom plugin development. He subsequently tried to bootstrap a WordPress services firm just to discover that services is not something that he wants to do for a living.

By day, Akshay is a Human Resources professional and heads HR at the India office of Fab.com

Currently he occasionally freelances on interesting WordPresss projects and supports a couple of WordPress plugins authored by him. He aspires to build a successful WordPress product company some day.

Speaker Session: Embedding and consuming external content in WordPress: Requests, Caching, Parsing

Ramya Pandyan

IdeaSmith is the digital doppelgänger of Ramya Pandyan (middle-class Mumbaikar, intrepid train-traveller). As IdeaSmith, she battles obscurity, slays boredom and keeps a lot of people entertained with her stories about Mumbai, men, books and life at large. She blogs, tweets, Insta’s, FB’s, +G’s and Goodreads.

Her verbal performances air at The Idea-smithy and XX Factor. Tweet-bomb her at @ideasmithy.

Speaker Session: The Content Creator’s Life – Challenges, Motivations, Concerns

Raj Mehta

Raj Mehta is an 18-year-old blogger and designer, who is going through the throes of formal education. He got into web design when he was 15 and has never looked back since.

He blogs at “Raj himself“ about his experiences. When not attending college or working, he spends his time playing the keyboard and hanging out with smart folks.

Speaker Session: Typography for WordPress

Jatin Hariani

Born and raised in Mumbai, Jatin Hariani is a developer and designer with 4 years of experience under his belt. From major web applications to simple corporate websites, WordPress has been a major building block in most of the projects he has worked on.

He tweets about WordPress, Web Development in general and a bunch or random things at @JatinHariani.

Speaker Session: Simple WordPress Troubleshooting

Krishna Mehta

Krishna (aka Adaire) is a 17 year old from Mumbai who blogs at Ink on Pixels. She has been taken part in NaNoWriMo 2014 and is a national level TSEC 2014 debator. She has also written a novel.

Speaker Session: WordPress and the Youth!

Vishal Kothari

Vishal Kothari has been working with WordPress for the last 3 years. He is the founder of Tyche Softwares, a company that develops WordPress plugins. Vishal has been working with PHP since last 14 years.

Speaker Session: WordPress Settings API – Settings, Sections & Fields

Hope you are happy with our finalized list of speakers. You can view the entire list here.

So join us for WordCamp Mumbai, tickets are available!

WordCamp Mumbai Tickets are Available!

A couple of days ago, we made our tickets available. Though we shared this information on our social media channels, we have waited for a couple of days to announce it via a blog post. Mainly, we has a few glitches to iron out and more importantly we had not released the final list of speakers for WordCamp Mumbai 2015.

wordcamp-tickets

We think it is important that you see who is speaking and what they are speaking about at WordCamp before you buy a ticket. 🙂

So you can see all the speakers, check out who else are attending and then buy your ticket.

The ticket price is INR 500/- only and is non-refundable. We are not rolling out any discounts but some of our volunteers, organizers, speakers and sponsors get a free ticket.

Visit https://2015.mumbai.wordcamp.org/tickets/ and book your tickets.

Credits

Thanks to Vachan Kudmule our ticket wrangler and long time WordCamp Mumbai organizer/volunteer. He has written a Camptix plugin that makes it possible for us to process ticket payments from the WordCamp website itself. This plugin can be used by other WordCamps in India using INR currency. So it is good karma for community.

Also special thanks to Ian Dunn for helping us get this plugin working on this website.

Link: Tickets

Second List of Confirmed Speakers

Last week we had announced four speakers in our first list of speakers. Now its time to announce the next four speakers who have confirmed participation at WordCamp Mumbai 2015.

Gaurav Pareek

A free software fundamentalist and an avid GNU/Linux advocate, Gaurav started his WordPress journey in 2010. He ran a successful design agency from 2009 to 2014, and built more than a hundred websites using WordPress.

Currently, he works as a Senior Software Developer at Digital Vidya and learns things about digital marketing.

Speaker Session: Better WordPress development with Vagrant

Prasad Ajinkya

Prasad Ajinkya loves to tinker with all things web. He is a co-founder at 13 Llama Studio and works with organizations to solve their business problems through technology.

Speaker Session: WordPress for the Enterprise

Faishal Sayed

Faishal has been in the world of WordPress since past 4 years, and since then has had a great time. WordPress is his hobby, passion and a big part of his profession. He has been contributing to WordPress core along with the handful of plugins released on the official repository.

He is currently working as a Web Engineer at 10up playing full time with WordPress.

Speaker Session: Best Practices for WordPress Development

Bryce Adams

Bryce is a WooCommerce Ninja at WooThemes, who has spent the last several years travelling around South East Asia while developing WordPress plugins and recently handling WooCommerce support. He’s currently based in Bangkok, Thailand and blogs over on bryceadams.com, talking about nomad life.

Speaker Session: The Settings Experience – Why It Sucks

Hope you are happy with our Speaker List so far. We will announce a few more in a couple of days. 🙂

Link: List of Confirmed Speakers

Last Call for Speakers! [Closing 25th Jan 2015]

Note: Speaker Applications are now closed.

We are closing the “Call for Speakers” form on the 25th of January, 2015. We increased the timeframe by a further ten days to allow more local applicants to apply.

So if you think you can talk about WordPress to a bunch of WordPress enthusiasts, do apply. If you know someone who can speak, tell them to apply fast!

What happens after 25th January 2015?

We are already in the process of finalizing some speakers and announcing them on the site. All applications will are being jointly handled by a “speaker review team”.

Based on feedback we got from our local meetups and community at large, we will announce a complete and final list of speakers and sessions.

Hopefully by the end of this month itself, we should roll out ticket sales and you will be able to decide better more or less all speakers being listed.

Then through first ten days of February, we are hoping to announce a complete schedule.

Link: Call of Speaker – Application Form

Our First List of Confirmed Speakers

As our ‘call for speakers’ enters its final week, we have already confirmed a few speakers. WordCamp Mumbai 2015 should be a great meeting point for local WordPress users, enthusiasts and developers to listen to and interact with many experts from around India and also around the world.

We were lucky to get applications from around the world and also a few locally.

Today we are announcing a first list of four confirmed speakers.

Sam Hotchkiss

Sam Hotchkiss has been working with WordPress for the last 10 years. Over that time he worked as a freelancer, built a successful agency, raised venture capital and started a product business, BruteProtect, which was acquired by Automattic in 2014.

Sam now works on the Jetpack team at Automattic and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wonderful wife and their three dogs.

Speaker Session: Goodbye to /wp-admin

Amit Sharma

Amit is a self-taught designer-developer, who runs a development firm by the name of 13 Llama Studio in Mumbai, who specialize in making WordPress do things that you have probably not heard of. Besides development, he likes to spend his time with music, photography or on a road trip.

Speaker Session: WordPress as the backbone of a mobile app

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and Core contributor based in Southern California. After contributing to Twenty Twelve, he was the backup lead and main developer for Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, the most recent default themes.

At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes back to WordPress full time. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.

Speaker Session: Building Themes: Lessons Learned from Contributing to Default Themes

Rahul Bansal

Rahul Bansal is founder & CEO of rtCamp. He is using WordPress from 2007 and developing on WordPress from 2008.
These days he is focused on making WordPress sites faster using Nginx through his EasyEngine project.

Speaker Session: Debugging WordPress Performance using EasyEngine

We have confirmed a few more speakers and some final details are being worked out. We will publish a second and possibly third list over the next week.

The call for speakers is still open and if you plan to speak at WordCamp Mumbai 2015 – I advise you to apply fast!

Links: Apply as Speaker | List of Confirmed Speakers

Contribute to WordCamp Mumbai by Sponsoring us

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Call for Sponsors

WordCamps would not be possible without the sponsors who basically fund this great gathering of WordPress users, developers, bloggers, designers and enthusiasts.

This is the third WordCamp in Mumbai, and the second one being organized by our Mumbai WordPress Meetup Group. We are looking to make this event an even bigger success than 2014, but our plans are tied to the generosity of our sponsors and contributors.

So here is our “Call for Sponsors”

This year we have included an additional slot for Individual Sponsors. This is not just a great space to Market your products and services, but also to hire hence we have included an option to setup desks in a couple of the slots.

Image source

Call for Speakers

wcmumbai-speaker

Call for Speakers

WordCamp is all about having speakers talk about different things regarding WordPress. We are putting out a “call for speakers” for WordCamp Mumbai 2015.

Since we are not planning to host separate tracks simultaneously, it would mean we need to have more crisper, shorter speaker sessions this time around. We also want to encourage local languages and would love to have a speaker session in Marathi, the local language of Mumbai.

The speaker registrations will close on the 15th 25th January 2015 or earlier if we fill-up all speaker slots.

Before applying do go through our guidelines and fill out the form below.

Speaker Guidelines

  • The speakers sessions will have to be on topics that are related to WordPress. This is a no-brainer but diverging a little off WordPress sometimes when you take questions is fine, but the core of your talk must be related to WordPress.
  • As a speaker, you should have a decent level of expertise over the topic of your session. Speakers should be ready to take questions during the talk at times and obviously after the talk is over.
  • Speaker sessions are planned to run 20 minutes and then a 10 minute Q&A.
  • We expect our speakers to be contributors to WordPress community. This means we expect them to pay for their own travel and stay. This is a speaker’s way of contributing to the WordCamp.
  • We also expect our speakers to be participants at the WordCamp. This means speakers will need to ideally be around for more than just their own session.

All speakers, participants, organizers and volunteers are all expected to follow the Code of Conduct at WordCamps.

What happens after you fill in the form:

  • As soon as we get an application, you will receive a first communication asking for more details of your speakers sessions.
  • A volunteer team will discuss each speaker application decide to either reject or get more information from the speaker if needed.
  • Initially a speaker will be informally confirmed. Only after the speaker sends out a full draft and scope of the session along with a time frame, will their name go up on the official speaker list.

image credits

Speaker applications are now closed.