WordCamp Philippines 2008: Bloggers Made Better
With about 300 bloggers, mostly hardcore, attending last Saturday's WordCamp, there must at least be a hundred blogs posts talking about it by this time. I could have chosen to just leave everybody else talk about it.
For the sake of coming up with a unique approach to the event, may we start with suggestions that will hopefully be considered for WordCamp 2009.
- Networking sessions: To enable participants to get to know each other and introduce their blogs, we suggest Four 15 minute sessions where participants break into small groups and exchange cards with one another.
- Additional Day: make the next WordCamp, if possible, a 2-day affair. There were too many good topics and some that I found very interesting were held on the same time slot.
- Priority Topics: Some sessions should be given longer timeslots. A particular topic that I would prefer to be lengthened is about responsible blogging and online journalism. There are many problems with the country's traditional media and the blogosphere need not make it worse. On the contrary, blogging, like any new technology, should help make the world a better place.
For other suggestions, I will write about it if I come up with any.
As for my rating of the affair, the event was very successful. Thanks to the organizers, participants never paid a single cent but gained a lot in return. They met and directly ask Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, questions and hear the answers directly from him. Matt was easily reachable, during the entire affair as well as the evening party at The Fort.
The speakers were good and generously shared their knowledge; the plenary and breakout sessions were held in the air-conditioned auditorium and lecture rooms of the College of St. Benilde; all participants were provided with free lunch; coffee was available the whole day, loot bags were given to everyone and the sponsors gave away a number of tokens.
WazzupManila raffled off a number of movie premiere tickets (Hellboy, Bangkok Dangerous, ITALY, and Righteous Kill) and I think, we still have a good number of movie tickets left which we will be giving away in this site.
For those who want to become great bloggers, attending WordCamp is a step in the right direction. See you all in WordCamp 2009.
