The great speaker announcements continue. Will they ever stop?

Joe Boydston @joeboydston

Joe is an advocate for open source, an evangelist of Journalism and a dreamer of exciting futures for both. A Knight News Challenge winner, named Innovator of the year by Suburban Newspapers of America, and serves on the board of directors of the Local Media Foundation. His latest endeavor is the founding of NewspaperFoundation.org. It’s goal is to promote the use of open source software by newspapers.

Joe will be talking about “Free speech, free press, free software – How WordPress is saving Journalism”.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements this week!

Here comes another one!

Zac Gordon @zgordon

Zac currently teaches WordPress for the amazing online learning site Treehouse. An experienced educator, Zac has taught web design and development at the middle school, high school, and university level. In addition to teaching, Zac owns a web design company that specializes in making $975 templated WordPress sites for small businesses. Zac will be helping out in our WordPress Beginner’s Workshop on April 5th in Miami.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements this week!

Another speaker incoming! We are honored to have one of our favorite local speakers with us this year, talking about design.

Denise Jacobs @denisejacobs

Denise R. Jacobs is a regarded expert in Web Design and is an industry veteran with over 14 years of experience. She is now doing what she likes best: being a Speaker + Writer + Web Design Consultant + Creativity Evangelist who writes, speaks on, teaches, and coaches creativity, productivity, and innovation to both organizations and individuals in the business context. Denise is the author of The CSS Detective Guide, the premier book on troubleshooting CSS code; and co-author to the Smashing Book #3: Redesign the Web and InterAct with Web Standards and has presented and lectured at conferences and organizations such as South By Southwest, the BBC, The Future of Web Design, and Paris-Web.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

While speaker and sponsor information is important – and rightly so – we know people like to know about what’s happening AFTER the event. Yep, we are talking the after party. In past years, WordCamp Miami’s after parties have been revolving around drinks and a good time in the Coral Gables area. Got no complaints, but we wanted to raise the bar a bit. Plus for an event like this, we also wanted to provide a better atmosphere for networking and making personal connection (who has time to network at the conference with so many great sessions going on?).

So our after party of choice this year is Finnegan’s River. We think it’s going to be great for a few reasons:

1. New location. People coming to Miami want to see water and nightlife. In previous locations, we didn’t have that… but this new location does. Win!
2. Dinner is served. Many want to grab a bite to eat after WordCamp, and rightly so. But now you can grab something to eat at our after party location, and then grab some drinks later into the night.
3. Networking. It’s hard to meet new folks over loud music, so our after party location should be able to provide an environment where you can talk to someone without blowing out your voicebox.
4. Drinks. This is Miami, so of course drinks are there as well. We are working on drink specials, but we got water and soda too.

We are also working on a plan to provide special transportation (hey, I didn’t say party bus – where did you get that idea?) to take those without transportation from WordCamp to the venue. More information on this when you arrive at WordCamp.

We certainly hope you enjoy yourselves at WordCamp – make new connections while surrounded by great food and festive environment.

(BTW: Flennegan’s River site runs on WordPress, so we just had to go with them… although someone needs to tell them to turn on their permalinks).

We didn’t announce a speaker over the weekend and you are having withdrawal symptoms? No worries:

Andi Graham @BigSea

Andi owns Big Sea Design & Development in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is a designer and front-end developer who fell in love with WordPress in 2005 for her personal blog. Since then, she’s amassed a team of creatives and nerds who’ve tackled just about every business-logic problem out there with WordPress. She’s led WordPress-based projects of every scope and scale, including a huge multisite networks of small business sites, a complex COPPA-compliant BuddyPress user-generated content hub, a custom hotel reservation system (or two), dozens of directories, eCommerce sites and more.

Andi is scheduled to speak about WordPress multi-site. She’s going to knock it out of the park!

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

We would like to introduce to you our next confirmed speaker:

Brad Williams @williamsba

Brad is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, a co-host on the non-Ewok-operated DradCast podcast, and the co-author of Professional WordPress (1E & 2E) and Professional WordPress Plugin Development.

Brad is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly. His scheduled topic involves using WordPress as an Application Platform. Woot! Rest assured we had to sign numerous wavers before Brad could come down. And the insurance policy on his face is HUGE.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

We would like to introduce to you our next confirmed speaker:

Jayvie Canono @onefinejay

Jayvie Canono is the lead designer for WebDevStudios’ small business division. Before he took on this role, he was a freelance web designer and developer. Having learned to design for the web in-code, and with a background in print design through the family business, he’s grown a passion for bridging the gap for designers between the print medium and that of code. His WordCamp talks have focused on helping designers with a background in pushing pixels to make their work easier to realize into the languages of the web. In addition to his professional responsibilities he is also an aspiring bodybuilder and dedicates about three hours of each day towards fitness.

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February!

We are proud to start sharing with you some of our more local and close-to-home speakers. First up is Mr. Norcross:

Andrew Norcross @norcross

Andrew builds things. Internet things. He’s the founder / lead developer of Reaktiv Studios and the Senior WordPress Developer for Raven Internet Marketing Tools. To quote Andrew: “I live and work in Tampa, Florida with my amazing wife and three hell raising children. When not mainlining coffee or writing code, you can probably find me working on renovating the home I recently purchased. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess what I do. I rarely know anymore.”. You see, we are quoting him here so there’s nothing that can come back on us, right?

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements during the month of February.