What?
WordCamp NZ (2012) is the fourth annual conference for WordPress publishers, designers and developers based in New Zealand. It combines informal presentations with debate and discussion on the latest developments in the global WordPress community.
WordPress is a state-of-the-art web publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Attendees include some of the leading developers and users of WordPress in New Zealand, including graphic designers, digital content creators, bloggers , online community managers and marketing communications practitioners of all flavours.
We held our first event in August ’09 in Wellington for just over 100 attendees (full capacity at our venue.) One of the founders of WordPress – Matt Mullenweg gave a keynote talk and was featured on Kim Hill’s Saturday RadioNZ show. In August 2010 we were hosted by Unitec School of Marketing & Management in Mt Albert Auckland where more that 120 attendees enjoyed 2 streams of speakers covering the developers view and more of a content view in the main stream. In Feb 2011 we held the event at Te Papa in Wellington with guest speakers from the US, Australia and the UK plus a wonderful panel with NZ’s very own Richard MacManus (RWW) and David Farrar from Kiwiblog. It will be a hard act to follow.
When?
WordCamp NZ is to be held on the Saturday of 21st April 2012
Where?
WordCamp NZ 2012 will be held in Auckland which is NZ’s largest city.
The venue is fully equipped for events and is easily accessible by rail, road and public transport.
About WordPress
WordPress is a free, open source state of the art web publishing platform for building everything form a straight forward blogs to complex fully featured website.
Written in PHP and supported by the MySQL database, WordPress offers intuitive administrative tools and sophisticated design features.
Facts and figures
WordPress began in 2003 as a simple open source blogging tool and has grown to be used on hundreds of thousands of websites with a worldwide user and developer community.
Its active developer community is responsible for thousands of free plugins, applications that extend the core functionality of the platform and allow for a very comprehensive feature set.
This thriving developer ecosystem has given rise to a flourishing WordPress industry with growing numbers of developers and designers delivering paid services.
Who uses WordPress?
WordPress is used by a growing number of high profile organisations. WordPress currently powers websites owned by The Financial Times, Reuters, CNN, Wall Street Journal and Yahoo!
In New Zealand a number of high profile sites use WordPress such as the New Zealand Stock exchange, Humans, BrightMinds Labs, Slamxhype, Thewire, Techsploder, American Chamber of Commerce – (Amcham), iJump – Simon Young, Brian Edwards Media and many others like the Journalism Schools at AUT and Wellington – Whitireia Journalism School and Victoria University student newspaper Salient.
There are also many smaller community groups like GreyLynn2030, Grey Lynn Community Centre and others like The New Zealand Rose Society using WordPress. There are also many creative businesses like Spacific Films , Topp Twins, Version Productions and MokoInk using WordPress.
There are many industry commentators like Andrew Dubber, Diversity (Ben Kepes), Bill Bennett, Lance Wiggs, Miraz Jordan , Gareth Renowden with Hot Topic , Steve Price on Media Law and Nat Torkington who all use WordPress as their platform. New Zealand techpreneur Rod Drury blogged at his personal site for 5+ years and can now be found at Xero.
If you work one or more of the blogs listed above (mostly a random list) and you have a back story that may benefit others in the WordPress community you should get in touch about possibly being a Speaker.
You Might Know Me from WordPress.com
WordPress also powers a free, blog hosting service at WordPress.com which draws roughly 100 million unique monthly visitors and is among the top 25 global sites, according to research firm Comscore.
There were around 22 million WordPress publishers as of February 2010: 10.6 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 11.4 million active installations of the WordPress.org software. In January 2012 that has grown to 70m.
See usage stats for WordPress over here
How many people read blogs on WordPress.com?
Over 313 million people view more than 2.5 billion pageseach month.
Event sponsorship
There are two levels of sponsorship available for WordCamp NZ 2012
Sponsoring WordCamp NZ puts your organisation in front some of the most tech-savvy web professionals in the NZ in an informal and relaxed environment.
Private, microsponsor packages start at $150, for individuals or groups who wish to contribute funds to the second WordCamp NZ event. Publicity is optional for private sponsors who wish to support the event on a more low key level.
Wordcamp NZ has been set-up as a non-profit charitable trust NZ Charities Commission infomation is available over here. Registration number CC43191
Corporate marketing options include:
Distribution of publicity material to all WordCamp NZ delegates although we aim to minimise swag bags full of material no one will actually read so more is definitely less
Corporate logo displayed at the event on overheads and other suitable locations.
High visibility areas for your free-standing banners/pull-ups/posters (to be supplied by sponsor).
Corporate logo and links for 12 months on the following WordCamp NZ sites:
– http://wordcamp.org.nz
We would be happy to discuss a package that suits your marketing requirements.
Why sponsor WordCamp NZ 2012?
You will be able to connect your brand with influential bloggers and talented designers and developers involved with WordPress. We are looking for a small number of key sponsors and your marketing communications will be targeted to a small but genuinely receptive audience.
The audience
This is the fourth WordCamp to be held in the NZ and is likely to attract a wide and varied audience of the WordPress NZ community.
Many attendees will be responsible for blogs and websites with traffic ranging from hundreds to many thousands of visits per month. A number of confirmed attendees run multiple websites or are decision makers within development organisations.
Many will be updating their blog networks and social media sites live or between sessions so actual readership can be deceptively influential and sometimes quite large as well.
Speakers
Speakers have not been announced yet but generally they are all influential in their specialist areas and typically have substantial readerships in NZ, Australia, US and elsewhere.
WordCamp NZ 2012 contacts
Event enquiries – Dan Milward
Sponsor Enquiries – Jason Kemp
Relevant website links
http://wordcamp.org.nz
WordCamp NZ site
http://central.wordcamp.org/
WordCamp worldwide schedule
http://wordpress.org/
The main WordPress website
