BuddyCamp Vancouver

Thanks everyone who came to BuddyCamp Vancouver both in person and via the live stream! Thanks also to the sponsors who made it possible. Thanks to the organizing team, Joey, Jill, Boone, and Frazer and to the many students that helped with the event!

Here are what some of the attendees had to say about BuddyCamp. Thanks for writing posts about it and giving feedback helping us reflect and also help future BuddyCamp organizers!

A few highlights from BuddyPress Vancouver 2012 by Boone

#BuddyCamp Livestream Review by Ryan Edward

Cable in the Sky (photo) by Matt

7 Fantastic Presentations from WordCamp and BuddyCamp Vancouver 2012 by Sarah Gooding

BuddyCamp takes place in Burnaby by Amy Judd, Global News

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Photo from the end of Hack Day

Now that we have introduced a number of our excellent speakers, it’s time to tell you about our fine sponsors that are making this event possible.

We are very pleased to have CA Cloud sponsoring both BuddyPress at the Platinum level and WordCamp at the Platinum Plus level.  Please be sure to say hello to them and stop by their table in the lobby area outside the presentation rooms.

CA Cloud (www.cacloud.com) is the leading provider of on-demand cloud hosting services in Canada with redundant enterprise infrastructure, easy-to-use tools, and cloud solutions in a highly available environment. CA Cloud offers Elastic Cloud Servers, Flexible Cloud VMs, Shared Cloud Hosting and CDN with everything you need to build WordPress Blogs and websites within 5 minutes, host SaaS Applications or databases for webapps with instant scalability. CA Cloud is SSAE16 Type II certified and 100% Canadian-owned and –operated.

We are really pleased to be able to announce the last minute addition of Matt Mullenweg to the BuddyCamp line-up! Matt Mullenweg will be on a panel on the morning of Oct. 14th along with BuddyPress lead John James Jacoby and core developers Boone Gorges and Raymond Hoh on the topic of the Future of the Social Web! It’s sure to be an interactive and insightful panel. Matt will also be participating in part of Hack Day.

Matt is a founding developer of WordPress, the open source software powering more than 16% of the Web and founder and Chief BBQ Taste Tester for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and a number of other services like Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, Intense Debate, Poll Daddy and more.

In December 2011, Mullenweg was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social/Mobile for the impact he has made on the blogging world through open source. He was also recently named one of the top 10 most influential people on the Web by Business Insider. Mullenweg supports a number of philanthropic organizations including Archive.org, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Long Now, and Innocence Project. He is the founder/director of the WordPress Foundation, and a sponsor of the Apache Foundation. (Source: Wikipedia, ma.tt)

If you have been procrastinating getting your ticket, you won’t want to delay, BuddyCamp is only five days away, space is limited and we’re anticipating selling out soon! If you can’t make it to Vancouver, you can catch all the action via our live stream, interact online during the event, and if you act fast, you can even get the first-of-its-kind BuddyCamp t-shirt!

We will be posting later today some very exciting news about a last minute addition to BuddyCamp! Stay posted…

We’re thrilled to announce that BuddyCamp Vancouver will have a great pre-party, in combination with WordCamp’s after-party. We’re going to be hosting it at The Mill Marine bistro in Downtown Vancouver at 7pm on Saturday October 13th after WordCamp Vancouver.

The Mill Marine is a great location with ocean and mountain views. We’re going to have the entire restaurant booked out for WordCamp & BuddyCamp attendees. It should be a great socializing and networking opportunity for everyone. We might even have a special guest (surprise, surprise).

Thanks to our generous sponsors, we’ll be able to provide appetizer style food for the group. There will be a cash bar.

The Mill Marine Bistro is located at 1199 West Cordova Street – Vancouver, BC. Watch out though, it’s not quite on Cordova, it’s actually right below, and it’s entrance is from the pedestrian seawall.

Remember the party is for attendees only, so go get your Wordcamp ticket and BuddyCamp ticket if you haven’t yet!

We figured with just a bit more than a week to go that it was about time to release the BuddyCamp Vancouver schedule!

We are really pleased with the all-star line-up of speakers and think you will enjoy the event whether you come in person to the event venue in Vancouver or participate via the live streaming.

If you haven’t already got your ticket, you won’t want to delay!  We had to order the very cool BuddyCamp T-shirts and estimate our final numbers.  We have enough t-shirts for the remaining batch of tickets listed but they are going fast, and we won’t be able to re-order in time for the event if you miss this batch.

If you want a t-shirt with the already low admission price, you won’t want to procrastinate!

We heard a lot of BuddyPress enthusiasts wanted to participate in BuddyCamp Vancouver but couldn’t make it to town so we are happy to announce that we are offering a live stream of the event!

Regular live stream tickets are only $10 and include the live stream for all of the sessions on Oct. 14th (keynotes, education track sessions, and developer track sessions). Live stream participants will also be able to participate in a BuddyPress group that will be used for more interaction, and questions and answers during the event.

Alternatively, you can get a live stream and t-shirt ticket package for $22 with ground shipping included (while quantities last!).

Please see the Tickets page for more information and to purchase.

Hack Day on Oct. 15th is not being live streamed. More details will be available shortly though about how you can participate in Hack Day remotely.

We are also looking for a live stream main sponsor as well as community sponsors. The community sponsors are intended for organizations that are using BuddyPress such as schools but that have a limited budget for sponsoring. The live stream sponsors will be listed on the live stream page that will be published shortly. For more information on live stream sponsorship, please see our Sponsors page.

Proceeds from live stream ticket sales and sponsors go towards the related costs of offering the live stream.

It is our pleasure to be able to announce that BuddyPress guru Bowe Frankema from the Netherlands is coming to BuddyCamp Vancouver 2012! He has a deep background in BuddyPress as you can see below and will be a fantastic addition to the already all-star BuddyPress cast!

I have been happily doing BuddyPress theme development since the days of BuddyPress 1.0 and I think I can safely say that I’m one of the few people out there who actually learned about BuddyPress before WordPress. Over the years I’ve blogged a lot on BP-Tricks.com sharing BuddyPress tricks, created several BuddyPress themes (free and commercial) and I’m currently part of PressCrew; a WordPress/BuddyPress development adventure with my friend and business partner Marshall Sorenson. Besides our Infinity Theming Engine (http://infinity.presscrew.com) we’re also part of the Commons in a Box team. It goes without saying I’m loving all of this, and I’m extremely looking forward to visiting the first BuddyCamp.

Bowe will be speaking about an exciting project that many are eagerly awaiting, Commons In A Box!
Here’s the description of this session you won’t want to miss!

Commons In A Box is a software project aimed at turning the infrastructure that successfully powers the CUNY Academic Commons into a free, distributable, easy-to-install package. This session will give you a first look at the project, showcasing a live demonstration of CBOX in action, and in-depth look at some of the design and development decisions our team has made. We’ll cover some plugins that go nicely with CBOX and give you an impression of the ideas we have planned for the future.

We have just released our second batch of tickets and they are already going fast! Don’t delay on getting your ticket if you plan on attending BuddyCamp Vancouver and please also spread the word about the event… we just announced it a few weeks ago so it’s been a bit of a whirlwind to get the word out but the news is spreading fast with your help.

We also have to very soon put our order in for the first-of-its-kind BuddyCamp t-shirt so please don’t wait until the last minute to register if you want one of these cool shirts that come with the already low-price registration!

We are very pleased to announce that Andreas Karsten will be coming all the way from Berlin, Germany to present to BuddyCamp Vancouver! He brings a really interesting mixture of expertise in education, training and learning, youth studies and BuddyPress.

I have used BuddyPress since its very early beta stages in 2008 to build an online learning platform for the qualification of youth researchers at dip.youthstudies.eu. Currently I am heading the team of youthpolicy.org, a global community and knowledge base on youth policy built with WordPress and BuddyPress. In the youth field, I am a hybrid between youth research, youth policy and youth work – and in a similar fashion, in the world of WordPress and BuddyPress I am a hybrid between advanced user, inconspicuous developer and tartly pundit.

Andreas will present as part of the education track on the afternoon of Oct. 14th. His session is entitled, “BuddyPress and Open Education: a happy relationship in 10 steps”. Judging by the description below, this is going to be a presentation you won’t want to miss!

Online learning communities and open source software are almost an old shoe, of course – but online learning and BuddyPress? That’s a young couple, deeply and freshly in love, going through their first happy months of mutual discovery. What will happen when the initial excitement wears off? Will open education, the experienced groom, turn around and go back to Moodle? Will BuddyPress, the beautiful young bride, drift away to wild young lovers? There are many things that can go wrong in a fresh relationship, and in this session we will therefore look at ten things the BuddyPress community should do for online learning – and ten things the open education movement should do for BuddyPress.

As we are getting close to BuddyCamp, you won’t want to delay in getting your ticket!

We launched tickets to BuddyCamp about a week ago and already the first batch of 75 tickets has sold out, mostly before we even had our speakers and sessions posted!

We have added another block of 75 tickets. We anticipate these selling out within a week as well so you won’t want to delay in getting your ticket to the first-ever BuddyCamp!

Also, if you want to get a BuddyCamp T-shirt as part of your ticket, please don’t wait until the last minute to register. Please register as soon as possible as we need to finalize numbers and order these soon! It also really helps with planning the after party and lunch catering if we know how many attendees we will have as far ahead in advance as possible.

If you wait until the last minute to get your ticket, it may be too late to get a T-shirt, at least of the right size, and we also may soon be sold out! BuddyCamp is in only 17 days!

Also, don’t forget to check out our sister event, WordCamp! Lots of WordPress/BuddyPress goodness from Oct. 13th to 15th!