Former MousePlanet MouseStation Podcast co-host Mike “Demo” Demopoulos is a lover of open source first, specific tools later. Because of this, he speaks at Ignite! Conferences, Meetups, WordCamps, Joomla! Events, and more. Mike volunteers with The Joomla! Project as the former treasurer of Open Source Matters (the not for profit organization for Joomla!) as well as serving on the Joomla! board.

Mike Demopoulos has spoken on various open source topics including WordPress and Joomla! in addition to marketing related talks which include A/B testing content.

Before coming to BoldGrid as a community evangelist, Mike spent years building a strong client base in the financial and insurance industries. He believes in sharing his business acumen and marketing insight as it fits within his main goal of building a community.

When he’s not spending time with his wife Kayla, you may find Demo at a Disney Theme park, collecting artwork, or hanging out with his dog B’Elanna.

Be sure to say hi to Mike Demopoulos on Twitter at @MPMike.

Mike will be speaking at 3:30pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. His talk is entitled, How to Monetize Your Passion Project.

One of the qualities of a good developer is the ability to find and solve a problem. We create plugins for client projects and then realize it has a wider use case. So, we submit it to the plugin directory or open our GitHub. Pretty soon, you have adoption and support requests. So, how can your plugin support itself?

After all, you can’t eat good reviews and the hard-to-find donation button only gets you so far. What are your options for monetization without taking out core features or annoying your loyal users? In this talk, we will explore effective options and ideas to financially support your product so you can continue to develop and build.

Chris is an Senior Software Engineer at WP Engine who has been working with WordPress since 2008. He built one of the largest security plugins on WordPress.org, WordPress plugins and themes, Google Chrome extensions, WordPress development environments and solutions for sites large and small. When not writing code, Chris, a teacher at heart, has presented sessions, workshops and keynote addresses at numerous WordCamps and other conferences as well as taught computer security for St. Edward’s University plus other university courses ranging from computers to aviation.

Chris will be speaking at 3:30pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. His talk is entitled, Privacy Tech for Everyone: How to Improve the Privacy of Your Site for You and Your Users.

By now we’ve all heard of how important privacy is on the web. As site owners we have the responsibility of protecting both our own privacy and the privacy of our users. This talk will cover basic technologies to improve the privacy of your WordPress site as well as how to address topics of privacy above and beyond the security protections you’re already implementing.

Christie Witt is the lead designer for the Canadian Physiotherapy Association in Ottawa. She’s been a member of the WordCamp Ottawa organizing team since 2017. She has spoken at WordCamp Toronto, WordCamp Ottawa and the WordPress Ottawa Meetup. She’s passionate about goal-oriented design, user-experience design, and has deployed corporate re-brands across both print and digital platforms.

Outside of technology and design, Christie enjoys travelling, fine arts, and performing stand-up comedy in Ottawa. Follow her on instagram @creativechristabelle.

Christie will be speaking at 2:00pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. Her talk is entitled, Migrating 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress, a business process case study.

We migrated 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress. Learn how I assessed the business processes beforehand, conducted a company-wide process audit and implemented improvements involving the client services, business account managers, sales, finance, marketing and IT teams. I will also discuss how I built the CRM requirements and worked directly with the CRM developers to track and automate reporting of the various website statuses such as cancellations, suspensions, and brand new website build requests.

• How to assess the big picture around website processes
• How to work with different teams within a large corporation to educate them on business process updates
• How to work with the older generation on selecting website templates for migrations
• How a multi-site instance was set up for the migration of 1,300 websites

Paul is a Senior WordPress Full Stack Developer (Paul & Gina Bearne) and Partner/Developer at Matador Software, LLC

Paul will be speaking at 2:00pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. He will also be running a workshop on Sunday, July 14th at 2:00pm in the Manotick room. His talk is entitled, Child Themes and other tips, and his workshop is entitled, Contrib 2 core.

Child Themes and other tips

What is a child theme. Why do I need one and how do I create one?
We will also cover the bits knowlege you need to get started customizing your theme

Contrib 2 core

Learn how to contribute to the core of WordPress

Matt is a jack of all technical trades – development, devops, and he has a wire for pretty much anything. His day-to-day includes working on a start-up, troubleshooting WordPress sites and managing more servers than he thought he ever would. Helping people is what gets him up in the morning, and he uses his knowledge to help others reach their technology-related goals.

Matt will be speaking at 2:00pm in the Parliament room. He will be moderating a panel entitled, Page Builders in the Age of Gutenberg.

From the brains of several WordPressers comes a panel discussion on the use of page builders now that Gutenberg is in core.

Questions that could be touched on:

What does Gutenberg solve that Page Builders don’t? Vice Versa?
Should page builders continue to be their own interface or adapt and integrate into Gutenberg as a collection of blocks?
Why would a user want to use both a page builder and Gutenberg on the same site? Would they want to?
Should developers focus on developing for page builders, Gutenberg or neither?
How are you using Gutenberg today? How are you using page builders today?
How do we change our approach to building sites for clients, when they have this new level of control?
When starting a new WordPress site, what considerations would you take when choosing between a page builder, Gutenberg or the classic editor? Which one would you choose?
If you already use a page builder on your site, would you consider switching to Gutenberg?

Guest post by Shanta R. Nathwani.

Are you planning on attending my workshop, “How to organize your content through navigation and wayfinding” at WordCamp Ottawa on Sunday? Would you like to be selected as our case study that day? Fill in this form! Make sure you buy your ticket first! If you have any questions, you can contact me here. Remember, you must attend the workshop for me to use it as our case study.

Find the form here.

Jamie is one who believes there will be time to rest when you’re dead. He’s a developer for Gravity Flow, one of the best business process management plugins available for WordPress. He is also the lead PHP/WordPress developer at Innovapost and an important DevOps resource for the Canada Post Group of Companies. His experiences across the WordPress solution stack range from front-end designer, plugin developer, solution architect to devops resource. All layered on top of a strong foundation built through his Bachelor of Commerce degree at Carleton University – where the K stands for Quality.

Jamie will be speaking at 1:00pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. His talk is entitled, Humans in hallways getting help.

The sessions/presentations might be what pique your interest to attend your first word camp, but the conversations had in hallways outside them is what will keep you coming back. Whether you’ve been to 0, 1 or N+1 word camps before, you’ll appreciate how the hallway track offers the highest fidelity opportunities to communicate and share knowledge with others. After all, everyone is both speaker and audience member there!

In the first 15 mins of this session, Jamie will share all the hints to help yourself (and others) get the most out of every hallway track. After that, a series of breakout sessions on pre-selected topics will have us collectively bringing the best parts of the hallway track into a single session.

Pre-selected topics you say? Before July 10th, go to http://wordcamp.gravityflow.io/ to fill out the Hallway Track Topics of Interest questionnaire. It will identify the biggest overlaps of all attendees:

• 3 topics you most want to learn about in attending the conference.
• 3 topics you feel most knowledge/experience to share back with others.

Personalized versions of your answers will also be printed and available in same size as your registration badge / lanyard, making for an easy way to open conversations in the actual hallways with other humans getting/giving help. Especially if you follow the Pac-Man Rule for conversations @ conferences

Devon has an educational background in Interactive Multimedia from Algonquin College. Throughout his time at Algonquin he was valued as a quick learner that enabled him to focus on both the creative and technical sides of web development. Being involved from the beginning of a project right through to the completion of a website makes Devon an integral part of any development team.

While working at Alphabet®, Devon has analyzed and improved our online infrastructure. He also leads our development department and is responsible for all of our online production. Some examples of this work include database driven websites, flash videos and working within content management systems.

Previous to working with Alphabet®, Devon succeeded in developing and redesigning over hundreds of websites for many renowned companies around the world. He most notably has worked with Dell, NBC, Microsoft, Intel, Telus, Ottawa Senators, NBA, GMAC, and Dodge, among others.

Devon will be speaking at 1:40pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. His lightning talk is entitled, How to optimize your WordPress instance for Pagespeed.

During this 15 minute talk, I will discuss different techniques and tricks to optimizing your website from a pagespeed perspective.

– Plugins
– Hosting
– CDN’s
– Functions.php
– Tools to monitor page speed

Amy Lynch is a writer and freelancer focused on travel, international family life, creativity and flexible work. She is founder of ‘Babies, Business + Breakfast’, a community for parents who want to invest in themselves alongside their loved ones. As a former expat, she currently lives in Ottawa with her young international family, where she advises corporates and individuals on creating child-friendly business spaces and experiences.

Amy will be speaking at 1:20pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. She will also be running a workshop on Sunday, July 14th at 2pm in the Rideau room. Her lightning talk is entitled, Baby in the Boardroom, and her workshop is entitled, Startup blogging: Using WordPress to validate a business idea, write a book and build community.

Baby in the Boardroom

This talk is designed to help creatives, bloggers, event planners, marketers, content editors plan and document more inclusive experiences using WordPress to reach an often excluded audience of primary caregivers:
• My experiences bringing children into business settings at home in Canada and abroad
• The creatives and business owners I’ve met along the way and the challenges they’ve encountered
• What happens when you bring children into business settings and how I’ve documented it using WordPress as a platform
• Practical resources/takeaways: Inclusive experience tips for organizations, venues and event planners to accommodate primary caregivers and their loved ones

Workshop: Startup blogging: Using WordPress to validate a business idea, write a book and build community.

This talk is designed to help current and aspiring creatives, freelancers, bloggers, remote workers, business owners and side hustlers with limited time:
• My experiences blogging before and after becoming a parent
• Tools to carve out the time and structure for a creative practice
• How I’ve used WordPress to help me validate business ideas
• The evolution of a book through regular blogging
• Share your message and cultivate a following
• Practical resources/takeaways: Attendees will use interactive prompts and activities, leaving with inspiring tips and a practical roadmap to get started on validating their business idea, writing a book and building a community

Felice is:

*Recipient of the Mayor’s Community Builder Award for being on the United Way Speakers Bureau.
* Advocate for people with intellectual disabilities and mental health
*Inspirational speaker
*Award winning Real Estate Agent for the past 20 years
*Stand-Up Comedian
*Producer of a monthly Stand-Up Comedy show, raising over $3000 for charity in the last 5 years.
*Award winning parent. (Well in my own mind).
*Award winning landlord…. if there was an award for that!
* Award winning Avon Lady
*I love art, painting, baking, travel, my cabin in the woods, my kids & my grandkids, speaking to inspire and help others

Felice will be speaking at 1:00pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. Her lightning talk is entitled, The Three P’s to Success, A Personal Story.

Most people struggle with change and clarity of goals, with my three point formula…Purpose, Plan, Persistence, it will enable you to embrace change and have a clear path to success.