Here’s a bit of information on our speakers for WordCamp Portland 2013.
Keynotes
Brewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and Founder of the Internet Archive, has been working to provide universal access to all knowledge for more than twenty-five years.
Since the mid-1980s, Kahle has focused on developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. In 1989 Kahle invented the Internet’s first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company that was sold to America Online in 1995. In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive which may be the largest digital library. At the same time, he co-founded Alexa Internet which helps catalog the Web in April 1996, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999.
Kahle earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with W. Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky. In 1983, Kahle helped start Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving there as a lead engineer for six years. He serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive, and the Internet Archive.
Brewster will be presenting Internet Archive and Preserving WordPress Blogs.
Jen Mylo
Jen Mylo is a WordPress jane of all trades. After stints as the core software’s user experience lead and project manager, she’s now focusing on improving the contributor community through outreach and training, with an emphasis on increasing diversity. Jen has spent more than a dozen years in the web industry, with the last five years dedicated to the WordPress open source project.
Jen will be presenting The Only Constant Is Change.
Speakers
Aaron Hockley
Aaron Hockley is a photographer and technologist who’s been tied up in the blogging world since 2001. He remembers using WordPress before it had themes and Twitter before it had @replies, which means that he’s an early adopter, crazy, or both. Most of his professional photography work is for small- to medium-sized businesses and special events. When not behind the camera, he’s often found writing and speaking to photographers and the public about the intersection of photography and various internet-powered new media topics. His expertise on these issues has been cited in articles appearing in the media on CNN, the New York Times, TechCrunch, and BusinessWeek; he’s spoken at various regional and national events including several WordCamps and New Media Expo.
Aaron is presenting Social Photo Networking or Owning Your Content… Why Not Both?
Andy Hayes
Andy Hayes is a creative web producer based in sunny Portland, Oregon. Although his background is in IT, he’s owned a hospitality company, published two books, and has bought & sold a variety of travel and tourism websites. Currently, he is the chief creative producer of popular lifestyle website Plum Deluxe, which was founded in 2007. When not feverishly blogging or speaking, you’ll find Andy on twitter: @andrewghayes.
Andy is presenting Website Critiques: How to Decide What Works and What to Ditch.
Austin Gunter
Austin Gunter is a writer, blogger, and Community Architect. He manages the Content and Community marketing for WP Engine, the premiere managed WordPress hosting platform. Previously, Austin brought 120 startups through an incubator in Austin, Texas. Now part of WP Engine’s marketing offices in San Francisco, Austin blogs weekly about startups and hacking his own brain at austingunter.com.
Austin is presenting Lean Product Development: 4 Steps to Build Something Your Customers Want to Buy.
Big Ed Barnham
Big Ed Barnham is the owner of Big Ed Barnham’s Bauble Barn ‘n Garden, eastern Oregon’s premier one-stop shop for plastic reflecting pools, glittering orbs, wrought iron sculptures and other resplendent yard objects. He and his wife, Summer America Barnham, are also home distillers, home picklers, and occasional tax evaders.
Big Ed is presenting What’s This in My Mason Jar?.
Bob Dunn
Bob Dunn is a WordPress coach and trainer with a knack for turning ‘geek talk’ into a language the average user can understand. His one-to-one coaching, business and corporate training, and online classes are popular with WordPress users and clients all over the world. Bob has presented at the BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas, at various WordCamps, and at other regional conferences and events. An avid blogger himself, he shares useful tips and tutorials on blogging and WordPress at bobwp.com. He also educates user through his site bobwponline.com, where he teaches online classes.
Bob is presenting Making Your WordPress Knowledge Stick.
Christina Elmore
Christina is an editor and book producer who also works on web projects, including multisite WordPress installations and sites for fiction authors. She got into the nuts and bolts of ebook production in 2010 and has enjoyed watching the ecosystem mature. Currently reading about: content management systems as book-building tools. Other areas of curiosity: the role of structured metadata in publishing and an answer to the mystery of why fiction authors have such terrible websites.
Christina is presenting From URL to ISBN: Making Books from Blogs.
Corey Freeman
Corey Freeman has been building websites with WordPress since 2004. As a WordPress expert and Headway Themes specialist, she focuses on helping others build WP sites that rock now and will last forever.
Corey is presenting Stop Tweaking (Setting Up a Blog Now for Success Later).
Eric Mann
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 Senior Web Engineer at 10up where he focuses on developing high-end web solutions powered by WordPress.
Eric is presenting The Future of WordPress Lies in the Past.
Grant Landram
Founder of Freshmuse, a web design/dev shop in Seattle, Wa, Grant is a front end developer with a passion for WordPress. Grant has spoken at numerous WordCamps and technology conferences on how his company uses WordPress to serve it’s clients, and how he has built a business around the open source platform. His 2012 talk from WordCamp Portland was one of the 5 most watched WordCamp videos of 2012. You can follow Grant on Twitter or learn more at freshmuse.com.
Grant is presenting Creating a Better WordPress Admin Experience for Clients.
Kronda Adair
Kronda (prounounced Kuh-rawn-duh) is a freelance web developer who came to the tech industry after many years in retail and project management. She recently founded Karvel Digital and embarked full time into freelance WordPress development. Kronda is passionate about technology as a tool for social justice and loves teaching and mentoring. She would like to open up the technology field to more diverse groups of people and recently gave a presentation at Open Source Bridge titled Expanding Your Empathy. You can follow Kronda on Twitter or read her personal blog at kronda.com
Kronda is presenting Cap, Deploy, Profit: Automating Your Deployment Process with Capistrano.
Maria Erb
Maria Erb is an Instructional Designer with the University of Portland. She holds an M.Ed in Instructional Design from the University of Massachusetts in Boston and a B.S. in Technical Writing from Carnegie-Mellon University. She is the Director of the gurlBIKE project and Co-Founder of EdCamp Pittsburgh.
Maria is presenting Let’s Interrupt the Disruption with something Awesome: How WordPress can save Higher Ed.
Matthew Boynes
Matthew Boynes is a lead developer at Alley Interactive. The only thing Matt loves more than developing on WordPress is helping others develop on and solve complex problems using WordPress. When he’s not coding, you’ll often find Matt engaged in some outdoor activity like hiking or skiing.
Matthew is presenting Rewrite Recipes: Exploring advanced permalink structures by example.
Matthew Eppelsheimer
Matthew co-founded Rocket Lift, a WordPress development company in Portland, to offer the-future-is-now communication and information technologies to people solving big problems. He is an experienced management consultant and a veteran of startups in four industries. His interests include art and beauty, local food, journalism, and the open source cultural revolution.
Matthew is presenting Checklists: A path to mistake-free development and publishing.
Mika Ariela Epstein
Mika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. Working for DreamHost, she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, 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 about them on her own site, as well as for DreamHost.
Ipstenu is presenting Rolling your WordPress Support Character (Without Any Code).
Paul Clark
Paul is a TEDx speaker, WordPress core contributor, and co-founder at Brainstorm Media, a team of passionate designers, developers, and teachers. Together, they are in the business of changing the world using WordPress. He had the honor of creating a WordPress-based application that tracks medical care and human rights abuses for Free Burma Rangers, an organization that brings help, hope and love to displaced people in the warzones of Burma. Paul is proud to have created intelligent, intuitive solutions for great clients including The Wall Street Journal, Iomega, the California Attorney General.
Paul is presenting How WordPress Saves Lives & Moves Governments.
Zach Brown
Zach spends his days on the command line as a Senior Systems Engineer for 10up. He is obsessed with WordPress performance and helps large and small business scale their websites. His background is in meteorology where he learned to think like a scientist – a skill he uses today to troubleshoot complex problems.
Zach is presenting Tools of a WordPress Sysadmin or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Web.