WordCamp San Francisco 2010 Speakers

WordCamp San Francisco 2010 will have a wide range of speakers, from industry thought leaders to local WordPress practitioners.

Scott Berkun

Scott was a manager at Microsoft from 1994-2003, on projects including v1-5 (not 6) of Internet Explorer. He is the author of three bestselling books, Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, and Confessions of a Public Speaker. He works full time as a writer and speaker, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes Magazine, The Economist, The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, National Public Radio, and other media. He regularly contributes to Harvard Business and BusinessWeek, has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington, and has appeared as an innovation and management expert on MSNBC and on CNBC. He writes frequently on innovation and creative thinking at his surprisingly popular blog, scottberkun.com, and tweets at @berkun.

Scott will present “The Future of WordPress.”

Daniel Cook

Daniel Cook is a veteran game designer who runs the popular game design website Lostgarden.com. He writes extensively on the techniques, theory and business of game design. He currently works at Microsoft, was a professional illustrator in his youth and managed to collect both a degree in physics and an MBA. His most recent project, Ribbon Hero, turns Microsoft Office into a social game.

Daniel will present “Office Hero and How It Could Apply to WordPress.”

Michael “mitcho” Erlewine

Mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) is a linguist, coder, and teacher in Somerville, MA, whose work lies at the intersection of the internet and human language. He is the developer of the popular Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and HookPress, developed After the Deadline for Firefox for Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), and has spoken at WordCamp Boston and WordCamp Tokyo. He has previously worked at Mozilla Labs and has been a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. He is currently a PhD student in linguistics at MIT.

Mitcho will present “Abstracting Your Code.”

Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel is an open source developer, author, and copyright reform activist. After working on CVS and writing “Open Source Development With CVS” (Coriolis, 1999), he went to CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” (O’Reilly, 2005). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google in 2006, he left to found QuestionCopyright.org. He now works at Canonical, Ltd and at QuestionCopyright.org, and writes and speaks regularly on copyright, open source, and the application of open source principles to areas outside software. His home page is red-bean.com/kfogel.

Karl will present “Bodysurfing the Blogosphere: How an Audience-Distributed Film Won Big.”

John Ford

Is it a bird? A plane? It’s John Ford! Don’t be fooled by the fact he’s traveled to 30+ countries (and counting) for work and pleasure. How DOES he do that? Simple. He started programming full-time in 1998, and in 2005 he figured out how to use WordPress to help pay the bills. In his spare time John spreads his demystify the web philosophy through community presentations and workshops. Want to catch John away from his computer? Good luck. Recent sightings have included early morning gym sessions, mountain bike trails with lots of jumps, and DJ lessons deep in the heart of the city that never sleeps. John likes to sleep, though, when he’s passing through his downtown Greensboro, NC, home.

John will present “Living with Our Computers (& Keeping it Healthy).”

Vanessa Fox

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was recently named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Look for her book Marketing in the Age of Google in early 2010.

Niall Kennedy

Niall Kennedy built his first website in 1993 after converting a HyperCard and LaserDisc presentation into HTML and video interchange formats. He co-organized the first WordCamp SF in 2006. Niall’s work has scurried down a crater on Mars, helped geeks find the cheapest Palm Pilot, indexed millions of bloggers minutes after publication, attempted to predict the financial future, re-imagined television, and connected the social web. He currently works as a consultant reinventing industries for the social web. Niall is the project lead for the VideoPress video hosting framework powering video sharing on WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, and an open source framework available under GPLv2.