WordCamp New York City 2009

Hi everyone. A bunch of updates:

Name Badges. The name badges are being printed today, so time is up for asking for fixes to company names, twitter IDs, etc. If you provided the wrong information when you signed up, you’ll have to just write over it with a sharpie or something at the event.

Competition. If you submitted a theme or plugin by the end of November 11th, NYC time, with an allowance of an hour for Daylight savings timestamp since we didn’t manually update the settings for standard time, then your submission is being looked over. We’ll get in touch with the finalists on Saturday and let you know that you’ll be on stage on Sunday. If you don’t make the top 3, we’ll let you know that too.

Refunds. If you bought a ticket but can’t make it, we’re sorry, but the site clearly states that tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable. Please consider your ticket a donation to the cause, and catch the sessions on wordpress.tv in a couple of weeks.

Unconference. If you’ve ever been to a BarCamp, you will be familiar with the “wall of sessions” concept. We’ll have the same thing, and people will indicate interest in unconference sessions by marking on the proposal sheets. We’ll allot rooms to the proposals with the most marks. Due to concern that people would miss out on things, we will not do any unconference sessions on Saturday (8 tracks of content should be enough, yeah?), so ALL unconference planning will happen live at the event Saturday, for sessions to occur Sunday morning.

Emails. If you didn’t receive the attendee email yesterday, you probably made an error when you entered your email during signup. If you are listed on the Attendee page, just show up between 8-9, and we’ll steer you in the right direction. If you are not listed on the Attendees page, it could be that your PayPal payment didn’t go through, or that you entered an invalid email address (which would mess up the script generating the Attendees page) (you didn’t think we were updating that by hand, did you?). If you send an email to say you signed up but don’t see yourself on that page, SEND YOUR PAYPAL RECEIPT. Without proof of payment, we can’t look you up. Bear in mind, what seems like an emergency that must be dealt with RIGHT NOW to you, may be lower on the priority list for us, as we have to get many things done today and tomorrow to be ready for Saturday, so please be patient if you don’t get a reply right away because there are other things more crucial to making sure the event happens. If you don’t get any reply, just show up Saturday morning and we’ll figure it out.

WiFi. We have very recently discovered that WiFi at Baruch is not all-encompassing as we thought, but is actually very limited. There will be a WiFi username and password for WordCamp NYC people to use, but there are limited access points and each one only supports 20-45 people surfing the web at a time. In addition, we’ll be sharing these access points with regular classes and other events in the college, so unless you are giving a presentation, don’t count on internet access at the event (presentations will have wired connections). If you have EVDO, bring it. If you have an iPhone, use 3G instead of WiFi. Or be a rebel, and realize that the point of WordCamps is to spend time with people face to face, and leave your laptop at home altogether. You can google them later.

***A repeat warning from the email that went to all attendees yesterday***
The access we do have is very limited. Please do not attempt to stream audio or video or download/upload torrents over the WordCamp NYC WiFi. If you do, and it clogs the network, we will shut down the username and password, and NO ONE will have web access. Please respect your fellow attendees and limit your internet use to light web browsing. Note: You will not be able to send outgoing SMTP mail over the WiFi as all ports are blocked, per Baruch.

Drinks. Just in case you didn’t get the email yesterday or you’re a late sign up, the deal on an afterparty is that there is no afterparty. No official afterparty anyway. All the money is being spent on the actual event. That said, we’ve scoped the local bars (most of which are small), and found one that has enough room for us and will offer WordCamp people the “game night” drink specials from 6-8. So if you want to go out after Saturday’s sessions, it’s not a sponsored event, but we recommend going to Tonic East, on 3rd Ave at E 29th St.

As the promised land of canonical plugins draws near, when WordPress plugins maintained by development teams rather than single developers working solo will hopefully become the norm*, we thought it would be fun to encourage people to think about working in development teams with a friendly competition. There will be two: one for themes, one for plugins. Time is short, so if you’re interested, read fast and start coding!

The Rules:
Each submission must have 2 or more contributors. At least one of these contributors needs to be a New York Metro resident, and present at WordCamp NYC on Sunday, November 15.

Submissions must be repo-ready. That is, they should be able to be submitted to the WordPress.org theme or plugin repositories and be accepted: no spam, no security holes, no duping an existing theme or plugin.

Submissions must be new creations, not yet released to the public. You can use something you’ve been working on as a starting point, but remember that you *must* have collaborators to enter the competition.

Plugins can do pretty much anything, but must be GPL and must be free (as in beer), and not be simply a giveaway to upsell add-ons that are not free and/or GPL.

Ditto themes. You can do a basic theme, you can do a framework, you can do something specific and functional like P2, whatever, but it needs to be original to get into the top 3. Just changing a few colors or shifting the layout of an existing theme will not suffice for the sake of this competition. You may submit WordPress *or* BuddyPress themes.

The Deadline:
Submissions must be completed by 11:59pm (NYC time) on November 7, 2009. Leave a comment on this post and point to where the judges can download the code for evaluation. In your comment, feel free to provide the “elevator pitch” for your submission, describing what makes it special, etc. Identify in the comment who is on your team (link to names), who is in NYC, and who will be attending WordCamp NYC. This will give the judges enough time to evaluate entries. Late entries will not be accepted.

The Judging:
Matt Mullenweg and other trusted WordPress-universe personalities will be evaluating submissions for code competency, user experience, and style. The top 3 plugin submissions and the top 3 theme submissions will be invited to face off at WordCamp NYC’s Sunday session, which will be held in a 1000-person auditorium. That’s a lot of potential users, employers, clients, and collaborators.

Each team will have a few minutes to introduce their submissions, and then the judges will let you know what they liked and disliked about your entry, after which teams will have a chance to respond (think Project Runway for open source software). After all teams have been evaluated, the judges will announce a winning theme and a winning plugin. These winners will be congratulated (and their winning submissions promoted) on the official WordPress Development blog at http://wordpress.org/development, which reaches millions of people, once the submissions have been uploaded to the WordPress.org repositories.

Start your engines and get coding!

*If you don’t know why canonical plugins = promised land, you should probably attend WordCamp NYC to find out!