WordCamp Victoria

At the last WordCamp, I received completed surveys from about 1/3rd of the attendees. On that survey, the final question was:

Would you attend a local WordPress Users Group?

The response options were “Monthly”, “Quarterly” or “No”, and totals were as follows:

• Monthly: 14
• Quarterly: 24
• Monthly and Quarterly: 1
• No: 10 (… and 4 indicated they lived too far away)
• Blank: 3

Clearly there is an interest in having a regular Victoria WordPress User Group. As such, I have undertaken the task.

Since there was a split between Quarterly and Monthly, I split the difference.

Dale Gann of Vancouver Island Technology Park has kindly volunteered their space for our meetings. I have booked the 2nd Thursday of odd numbered months, with meetings scheduled to begin at 6:30pm.

This means the first event is 9 days before WordCamp. I timed this intentionally … so people who are interested in coming to WordCamp, but feel they need a bit of a primer first can take advantage of this opportunity. At this meeting, I will be presenting an Introduction to WordPress. We will be charging $20 for this first meeting, to be split 50/50 between (a) funds for future WordPress User Group operations, such as speaker expenses, and (b) the Cridge Transition House for Women.

Why a charitable contribution? I figured this is a good habit to get into from the start. We can discuss whether to continue this as a regular practice at the meeting.

I’ve put some of the digital infrastructure in place, too, as follows:

• I renamed the Meetup group we had for WordCamp to WordCamp Victoria and Victoria WordPress User Group (since the audience for getting together is likely to be pretty much the same, as indicated by the survey).
• I set up a separate Twitter account for the Victoria WordPress User Group, though. I figured that this could eventually be a shared account for people who become active in the group, vs. yyjWordCamp, which we’ll keep specifically for WordCamp Victoria.
• I registered the domain name wpug.ca for potential future use. I figured we’d see what the interest is in having a website/blog for the group. While it seems obvious for a group of this nature, we could always use a section of this website for WPUG, instead.
• I did not set up any other social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). I thought we’d wait and see if there is a need/demand.

I’m looking for a team of people who’d like to help out with things. I suspect we’ll keep things pretty “ad hoc” until we see what the real interest is. If you are interested, please reply below or contact me elsewhere.

Like WordCamp, this is an event for everyone in the WordPress community. This includes bloggers, developers, designers and anyone else who is interested.

See you on January 13th!

We’re a ways off from the next WordCamp, but Social Media Camp is coming up on Sunday, October 3rd in Victoria. I suspected there may be some WordCampers that would find this event interesting and useful.

Thanks to DCMC Productions for the following video mashup from WordCamp Victoria 2009: