WordCamp South Africa
I am sitting at Cape Town airport, thought I would use the last few MBs of bandwidth I have bought to post a quick review of WordCamp South Africa. Matt Mullenweg and I came out to Cape Town to meet the local WordPress and tech/media enthusiasts who use and support WordPress, and blogging/social media in South Africa.
South Africans are doing interesting things with WordPress, and it has found use in many of SA’s most prominent media outlets. Justin Hartman and Vincent Maher gave some good insights into the back stories of WordPress implementations at established media institutions. They both deployed pretty large scale WordPress-powered sites in SA and had some good tips on things they learned in the process. Vincent is an insightful person and a calm and engaging speaker. I owe much of my early career to help from Vincent as he essentially mentored me during my final year at Rhodes by sending me manuals on cutting edge (at the time) technologies including something called Cascading Style Sheets, and then helping me get a job at VWV.
Matt spoke about WordPress and Automattic and focused on lessons learned building an online business, with some predictions and commentary on the business of software in general. It was a good talk, went down well. The thing about Matt is that he is the same approachable guy when he is talking to you at dinner about camera lenses, or talking to 120 people in Cape Town or talking to 500 people in San Francisco. People appreciate this about him.
I snuck onto the schedule and did a quick talk about WordPress.com and people seemed to enjoy some of the stats of a site of that scale. I was a little nervous and jetlagged, operating on 20 minutes sleep the night before. I am taking a lack of mass rebellion and hostile heckling as a good sign.
Some common themes which emerged in the talks and the conversations: Challenges and merits of WordPress vs WordPress MU, “does it scale?” (yes, it does), getting buy-in to Open Source in a culture of “Enterprise Software” and people responding “yes, we hope to” to my asking if they plan to Open Source the plugins and themes they have developed.
Some other highlights of the trip so far: Tyler Reed, Denham Coote and Jason Bagley are a great group of guys who not only put on an impressive event, but took Matt under their wing and looked after him and I so well in Cape Town. The future of social media and Internet technology in SA is in good hands with these guys. Also, the future of the food industry in South Africa (especially chicken related fast food chains) is secure as these guys will singlehandedly keep the sector viable. Personal thanks to them for being such entertaining hosts.
Chris Rawlinson from Stormhoek Wines is a fantastic guy, a gracious host (even at 5am) and now also a wonderful archive of fascinating Jennifer Aniston anecdotes. I wish Chris and Stormhoek Wines continued success in the future. Dave Duarte is an impressive and natural speaker and a warm and personable guy and I am glad to have hung out with him a bit. Good to run into old friends like Elan Lohmann again, he is a smart guy and looks to be doing good things in SA. Also met Jaques Marneweck and he is an interesting and smart guy with some strong opinions. I met many other cool people like Ashley Shaw, Malan Joubert and of course WordPress Rockstar, Adii Pienaar. Henk Kleynhans and the Skyrove team pulled out some real South African ingenuity and hauled in a truck-mounted mobile satellite wifi hotspot when the heavy Twittering at WordCamp took down the first one.
It was a worthwhile trip, but was very short and rushed. I still have family and friends in Cape Town and so I chose to selectively miss a few events to fit in time to see everyone I wanted to see. This is the kind of stuff that stresses me out, so I had to do some mental yoga and just be sure I was doing the right thing even when it felt wrong. I managed to see everyone, but not spend enough time with some.
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- vincent maher
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- matt
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- tyler
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- dave duarte
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- Adii
More pics on Flickr soon when I have some bandwidth again.
