Category: Community

Lightning Talk: How to build up resilience and keep burnout at bay

Burnout is one of the biggest threats to building an engaged team. A recent study found that 95% of HR leaders admit that burnout is sabotaging their companies’ work quality and employee retention; yet there is no obvious solution on the horizon.

Jochen is a long-time IT manager in corporate and startup environments, and has had to deal with burnout many times (both himself and to support team members). He asks: “How can we stay sane and productive in a world of rapidly changing objectives? Well, if the answer was easy, we wouldn’t have to talk about it. And yes, we really have to talk about it.”

In this talk, he will share his experience with building resilience for himself and his team. He will cover useful practices for managers, employees and the self-employed, such as:

  • recognising burnout symptoms
  • breaking out of the negative belief cycle
  • contributing to a healthy company culture
  • reducing time and resource pressure
  • restoring focus
  • building healthy relationships
  • dealing with change
  • developing lasting resilience

Lightning Talk: Selling WordPress, Panel Q&A

This is a discussion Scott Jones has been having with other agency owners and the cool people on the WordPress marketing team since last year. He said: “It’s a challenge that I face in my business life each day, when WordPress comes up against other CMS and DXP platforms, especially when they have such great presence and marketing behind them.”

He believes we need to do more to show why the open source WordPress is more than just a credible competitor and to support our community in communicating the benefits of WordPress to their clients.

So why is WordPress a sellable CMS? And how easy or hard is it to endorse WordPress when a client is asking about other platforms?

Scott said: “These are some of the questions I want to help to answer. It’s something that I work to achieve on a daily basis (with a mixture of success and failure).”

The CMS we all love is flexible, expandable, fast, well-supported, great for content editors and ultimately great for business. It’s not just a small blogging platform anymore, it’s a product that suits tiny businesses and enterprise businesses in equal measure, depending on the experience of the designers and developers working with it.

Scott Jones aims in this talk to give a fairly broad range of people new ideas, new arguments and renewed thinking on how to say “WordPress is the platform for you.”

This lightning talk will be followed by a short panel Q&A with Make WordPress contributors Abha Thakor and Colm Troy.

Lightning Talk: How popup libraries emerged with WordPress

Popup Libraries is an artist-led social initiative to create small pop-up libraries in arts organisations, community centres and other non-commercial spaces that are open to the public.

Each small library is built from books donated by the local community and other elements of the libraries are made from recycled materials. In addition to the books, the libraries also have notebooks, pencils, paper and pens to encourage visitors to engage with creating ideas or images inspired by the books.

It started out as a WordPress website featuring news about found popup libraries and featuring a resource section to encourage visitors to start their own library with downloadable pdfs of posters and labels.

The project’s first Popup Library was opened recently at Rua Red Arts Centre in Tallaght, Dublin.

The project was established to inspire creativity, encourage recycling and enhance community spaces.

Graphic designer and photographer Doreen Kennedy will tell the story of how it evolved from a WordPress website, its site structure and how both parts of the project are open source.

Contributor session: Livestreaming practical workshop

A hands on practical session on tips and equipment you can use to livestream Meetups, WordCamps and other events in your business.

If you have an attendee ticket for the conference and would like to book for this session, email dublin@wordcamp.org by 10 October 2019 including ‘livestream booking’ in the subject. There will be some opportunities to observe or volunteer for a practice session on the Saturday for those booking for the Sunday workshop.

Contributor Session: Participate in the teams

We will have tasks where you can join in on community, marketing, WordPress.tv and more. There will be help for those starting out on their contributing journey and those wanting to explore new teams, such as, theme review.

If you can help or are new to contributing, please team as soon as possible on dublin@wordcamp.org – please put ‘Contributor session’ in the subject.

What is contributing about? Find out more on our Contributor Session page.

Teams you can discover at WordCamp Dublin 2019

  • Accessibility – Maja Benke
  • Community – Marcin Kilarski
  • Marketing – Abha Thakor and Scott Jones
  • Support – Kayleigh Thorpe
  • Theme Review – Colm Troy
  • WordPress.tv – Mark Smallman and Leo Mindel
  • Site Health Check – Jenny Wong

The Marketing team

Some of the tasks already identified are:

  • Facebook Live
  • podcasting setup and tips document
  • identifying videos on WordPress.tv suitable for marketing WordPress (bring headphones)
  • subtitling videos on WordPress.tv
  • more to follow.

Contributor session: Using block content editor in WordPress

This is a practical session on using the new block editor in the content management system with tips for finding your way around it. There will be some examples from WordCamp websites to help those who might be thinking of volunteering for a future event or want more experience of how to use it.

We are inviting advance requests for areas to work on, common issues faced on WordCamp sites, and questions to help you use blocks in content. These can be emailed to dublin@wordcamp.org – please use the word ‘block editor’ in the subject.

This session is part of our programme to coincide with Digital Citizenship Week.

How to build a successful and meaningful partnership

The WordPress community is built on human relationships. In the context of business, nothing that lasts was ever built by a single person.

In the same way people connect with other people and develop networks, small companies can interact with larger organisations in a strategic way to build strong mutually beneficial partnerships.

Creating these relations requires time, effort and understanding. However, a lot of people struggle when it comes to contacting, developing and creating a connection with other entrepreneurs or large companies.

Thankfully, there are steps you can follow to approach a potential partner and write enticing emails and proposals that will immediately get their attention and bring you the desired results.

As a Partnerships Manager at SiteGround, our speaker develops relations like these. She will share practical tips and guidelines to help you express the benefits of a mutual partnership and expand them into a successful collaboration.

Why subtitles are a must for online video

This session will reveal why subtitling needs to be budgeted and resourced as part of your website scope and video content planning. From SEO and e-learning to accessibility and usability, thinking about subtitling is a must for your marketing, behaviour change and customer engagement.

Abha will also share the progress on the Make WordPress subtitling campaign aimed at encouraging a change in how the need and benefit of subtitles is viewed. There will also be tips on using online software Amara for subtitling videos on WordPress.tv, and a great way of practising skills which can then transfer to your work.

The session will feature research with users on their experience of how subtitles allow them and others to access content rich materials. We hope at the end of this session, attendees and speakers will join the list of campaign champions.