Don’t worry, the video is in English, and it’s about forty minutes of both entertaining and educational content. Enjoy!

WCSF 2011 will feature Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” address, several well-known speakers, activities, summits, workshops, and other events. If you’re a northern Californian fan of WordPress, or you love to travel to great WordPress events, this is one WordCamp that you can’t miss!

Have you ever been to WCSF? Do you plan to go this year?

How can you support WordPress? What kind of questions will you encounter? What if you aren’t an expert?

These just a few of the questions that Automattic Happiness Engineer Sheri Bigelow answers in her WordCamp Portland 2010 session, How to Support WordPress.

I became a volunteer in the WordPress Support Forums six years ago, one week after installing WordPress. I was what some would call a “n00b,” but while I was waiting for an answer to my question, I noticed a few installation questions that I could answer. Fast-forward six years later, and everything that I know about WordPress today was learned from answering questions on the WordPress Support Forums. If a lack of knowledge is preventing you from volunteering in the support forums, just start answering questions and you’ll be an expert in no time. It’s really a great way to learn.

What are you waiting for? Head on over to the WordPress Support Forums and the WordPress.com Support Forums and start answering at least a few questions each day. Your community will thank you.

You may have heard that WordPress is a democracy, that Matt Mullenweg makes all the decisions, or that Automattic governs the development of WordPress. Of course, neither of those are true.

WordPress is actually a Meritocracy. It’s really quite simple and efficient, but the more you contribute to WordPress, the more weight your opinions carry when it comes time to make decisions. Probably the best example of this is Andrew Nacin. When Nacin began contributing to WordPress, he could only submit his bug fixes and enhancements for review. After showing his commitment to the WordPress community over three months and a hundred patches, Nacin was asked to be a core developer. Now, Nacin’s bug fixes and enhancements go right to the core.

I could write pages upon pages describing how everything works, but I’d certainly have a hard time explaining it better than Jane Wells did at WordCamp Portland 2010 during her session, How WordPress Decisions get Made.

I’m sure that you’ve read a lot about WordPress 3.0 and the future of WordPress by now, but there’s just something about this particular format that I’ve always found to be more informative. Enjoy!

When you have 70+ speakers and volunteers working for gratis, you start out $2,500 in the hole. And when attendees started registering like crazy, it really was a double-edged sword. While registration was beginning to reflect the fruits of our labor, and the hype was building, my little budget spreadsheet was blinking red with every registration. I was laying out money for shirts, bags and food, and the sponsors weren’t showing up

For those that are willing to go through all of the trouble of putting a WordCamp together, I salute you!

If you have any feedback, let him know in the comments!

Because of a lack of WiFi and bandwidth at WordCamp New York, there will be no live audio or video streams.

*UPDATE* Just found out that WordCamp Victoria in Canada is also this weekend.

Blogs@Baruch, a program overseen by the College’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute is the largest WordPress project at CUNY. It is built on WordPress MU and enables members of the Baruch academic community to create individual, group or course blogs in just a few clicks. Baruch College is an advocate of WordPress and other open-source technology, making it a perfect fit for WordCampNYC.

The end of the email confirms that at some point this week, registration will open up for the sale of tickets. I’ll be there, will you? The event is on November 14th and 15th. Keep up to date with the latest information on the official WordCamp New York blog.

Automattic Lounge

WordCamp San Francisco was a total hoot! I met up with a bunch of old friends, made a few new ones, had some good food, drank a few brews, hung out with a whole lot of cool people and all the while, I was surrounded by WordPress goodness.

Thank you to all the organizers, volunteers and participants!

A few bits of interesting statistics and news from WordCamp San Francisco “State of the Word”:

• WordPress.org downloads were nearly twice as many as last year
• There are twice as many WordPress.org blogs on the web this as compared to last year
• Akismet caught just as many spam comments this year as last (count grew very little)
• There is a Blackberry version of the WordPress management app coming soon, iPhone version will see an upgrade
• There will be a GPL paid themes page on the WordPress Extend to encourage the business model
• At some point in the future, the WordPress and WPMU codebase will be merged
• WordPress 2.8 is very close to being released
• WordPress 2.9 will focus on stuff under the hood

I listened to a bunch of the presentations this year (for a change) and I found them all very interesting. Chris Pirillo is a blast on stage and his talk on building communities was insightful and slightly disturbing at the same time. You should see him emulate Venn Diagrams on stage with his hands going around in circles! John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, was fantastic. His slides are on slideshare but if you are into building communities and believe in Open Source philosophies and care even slightly about Mozilla, you should wait for the video and watch it.

The WordCamp Report has live blogs of all the speakers and the videos will soon be on WordPress.tv. My WordCamp San Francisco pictures are on Flickr and I took a bunch of others while I was walking around to the various meetups. I am planning on attending WordCamp Chicago next week.

From the list of sponsors, the list of attendees and the list of speakers, the enthusiasm for blogging and WordPress in India is not lost on me. If you have not checked out the Delhi Bloggers Group or one of the many other blogging groups and partnerships mentioned and you are an Indian blogger, you might be missing out. I am hopeful that the turnout will be fantastic and I hope to see some of the presentations on WordPress.tv

I am jealous that Matt and Om were able to visit the Taj Mahal because it appears that parts of the Taj might be restricted to visitors. Om has an interesting take on the Taj and Apple Computers and Matt has some nice pictures posted.

With that said, I’m happy to see that a date has been nailed down for WordCamp Columbus, that being May 16th, 2009. I hope the event lasts during the entire weekend and not just on a Friday. The event looks to be taking place at Columbus State Community College. Unfortunately, due to WordCamp Mid-Atlantic occurring during the same weekend, Matt will only be doing a keynote session at the Mid Atlantic event. However, organizers for WordCamp Columbus are working with Aaron Brazell, one of the people behind WordCamp Mid Atlantic to video stream his session to WordCamp Columbus.

As it stands, their are two employees from Automattic who are tentatively scheduled to appear. Noel Jackson who is the author of the Monotone theme will be discussing color manipulation and art direction in themes with PHP. Nick Momrik on the other hand will be outlining 10 things you didn’t know you could do on WordPress.com

Registration for WordCamp Columbus is not yet open but within the next week or so, we could see a registration page open up. The organizers would like for as many people as possible to register early to encourage sponsors to latch onto the event. As the event gets closer, the organizers may implement an entrance fee of $20.00 which isn’t bad at all.

I’m pretty stoked that a WordCamp event is happening in my own backyard. I know I’ll be attending the event, what about you? Be sure to bookmark the WordCamp Columbus website for further updates.

When - Saturday, August 16, 2008
Where - Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco — Map
Why - To get WordPress users together, learn from each other, figure out the future of publishing the web, and have a good time.

Sam Bauers – Sam will be speaking about upgrading WordPress and how to do it hassle free.

Lloyd Budd – Lloyd will be discussing the aspect of switching to WordPress. I’ll be particularly interested in what Lloyd has to say in terms of migrating from one system to WordPress.

Aaron Brazell – Aaron should be no stranger to most within the WordPress community. He’ll be discussing the aspect of search and findability.

Tantek Celik – Tantek will be discussing a subject I’m not too familiar with and that is Microformats. He’ll be discussing their past, present and future.

Jeremy Clarke – Jeremy will talk about democratizing the web through global voices.

Tom Coastes – Tom’s sessions will be about ‘something’. According to the speaker list, they have him listed as mystery meat.

Liz Danzico – Liz will be talking about Crazyhorse, the new branch of WordPress which is used as a User Interface testing bed.

Ben Huh – Ben huh who runs the I Can Has Cheezburger blog will be talking about LOLcats as well as the topic of virility.

Noel Jackson – Noel who is known for producing the Monotone WordPress theme will be talking about color theory and the making of Monotone.

Mark Jaquith – Mark, author of the popular Subscribe to comments plugin will be discussing secure coding with WordPress. A topic that all plugin authors should be interested in.

Chris Lea – Chris will be speaking about Nginx for Fun and Profit.

Alan Levine – Alan will be talking about the future of education and WordPress. It will be interesting to see how many educational institutions are tapping into WordPress and what they are doing with the platform.

SEO Rapper – That’s right, Chuck Lewis also known as the SEO Rapper will be performing at the event. That should be fun!

Matt Mullenweg – You can’t have a WordCamp without Matt Mullenweg! His session will be about the state of WordPress.

Will Norris – Will (will) be talking about OpenId, OpenAuth, and OpenStandards. Perhaps this session will unearth the possibility of WordPress supporting OpenID out of the box, sometime in the future.

Stephen O’ Grady – Stephen will be discussing open source business models. I imagine a prime example of such a company who is currently operating under an open source business model is Automattic. This session should be very interesting to those who don’t believe open source and business model should be in the same sentence.

Andy Peatling – Andy Peatling, the creator of the BuddyPress project will be on hand to discuss the state of BuddyPress.

Joseph Scott – Joseph will be talking about the WordPress APIs as well as the iPhone. will be interesting to learn where the WordPress APIs are going and how the team plans on extending or using the API for future versions of WordPress.

Kathy Sierra – Kathy will be talking about a subject that is very interesting to me right now and that is, kicking ass and creating passionate users. Passionate users are something I think all bloggers would like to have but never succeed in doing so.

Andy Skelton – Andy will be on hand to perform live.

Lorelle Van Fossen – Another WordCamp fan favorite Lorelle Van Fossen, will on hand to provide bloggers with 260 different ways to break WordPress.  If anyone can break WordPress, It’s Lorelle. Someone get this session on Ustream!

Jane Wells – Jane will also be discussing the Crazyhorse branch of WordPress.

Jeremy Zilar – Jeremy will be discussing how the New York Times transformed into using WordPress. I bet this will be an interesting session as well considering how large of a site the New York Times is.

Thats it. Those are the people who will be sharing their abundance of knowledge this year at WordCamp San Francisco. For those of you attending the event, you must choose wisely which sessions you plan on attending considering this is a one day event. The schedule has yet to be posted so keep an eye out on the official WordCamp San Francisco website for details.

For Those Attending:

Which of these sessions appears to be the most interesting to you? Also, if you will be Ustreaming, live blogging or Twittering the event, be sure to comment and leave us a link so those of us who are not able to make it this year can at least pretend we are there in real-time with your updates.