WordCamp Chicago

Reserving a hotel for WordCamp Chicago

February 11, 2010 by Heather Acton • 13 Comments

I posted the information about our venue last week and mentioned that The Congress will be holding a block of rooms for our group at a special rate – – that is true, however I have run into the tiniest glitch with the contract agreement that will be resolved by Monday, at the latest. To resolve, I have scheduled a face-to-face meeting with the Congress Plaza folks who, I have to say, have been extremely nice, prompt and accommodating in helping us organize.

There are several different contracts we need to enter into with The Congress in order to hold this event. The room block contract is just one of them…and that is the one we’re holding out on at the moment.

Anyone who has organized a large event in Chicago knows that there are unique challenges that come into play when juggling the different union contractual requirements. The Congress currently has 4 unions in their employ, as well as one small union currently on strike. Contracting with them has been a pretty straightforward process, but making sense of the different requirements and charges based on union requirements can muddy the waters just a little – – so my visit with their staff has the goal of clearing the waters and making sure we have everything we need and that we know exactly what we are paying for. Sometimes a face to face meeting can resolve things that a phone call doesn’t. Besides, I love Chicago – so I have no troubles visiting again for a day!

New developments because of this:

If you have contacted The Congress to book your room – they are not yet honoring the special room rate until we agree to sign the final contract.
Providing everything goes as planned, this contract should be finalized by Monday. I will announce it here when we have it ready for you to book your rooms at The Congress
In the event that we are unable to reach an agreement, I will post alternatives for you
Either way, I will also have alternative nearby hotels that you can arrange for your stay in Chicago for WordCamp

As always, thank you for your patience and understanding! I will get the information to you, via this blog, as soon as it is finalized on our end!

113 days left!!

Posted in Blog, Venue and Location, WCChicago 2010 | Tagged Hotel, Reservations, venue | 13 Comments

Video: Remembering 2009

February 9, 2010 by Heather Acton • 1 Comment

It only took him (almost) a year – but our friend, Brian Artka, finally edited and published his video from the WordCamp Chicago event held in June 2009. Brian did such a fine job putting this video together that we invited him back in 2010 as the official videographer of WordCamp Chicago – and he agreed. Awesome!

Wordcamp Chicago 2009 from Brian Artka on Vimeo.

Makes me excited for our upcoming event this June! There are 115 days left until WordCamp Chicago – have you registered yet? You should bring a friend!

Posted in Announcements, Blog, WCChicago 2009, WCChicago 2010 | Tagged 2009, Chicago, video, WordCamp | 1 Comment

WCChicago 2010 Venue Announcement

February 5, 2010 by Heather Acton • 6 Comments

After much searching and, literally, walking the beat in downtown Chicago – we have a venue for our event in June! I will spare you all of the messy and confusing details that got us to this place, but I do believe we have found a great place, and one that will suit our purposes in 2010 and beyond!

The Congress Plaza
520 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605

(on Michigan Avenue by Grant Park)

[googleMap name=”Congress Plaza” description=”WordCamp Chicago” width=”550″ height=”400″ directions_from=”true”]520 South Michigan Avenue Chicago, IL 60605 [/googleMap]

We have two rooms secured that enables us to run two tracks of panels/presentations – which is great! That is the number one suggestion we received from your feedback from last year’s event, so we are really excited to be able to provide the space for it this year!

The Great Hall is for our General Sessions (Keynote, Opening/Closing Remarks):

Congress Plaza - Great Hall WordCamp Chicago

The Windsor Room is for our break-out sessions (either Track 1: User Track or Track 2: Developers Track):

Windsor Room - Congress Plaza

We also have another room called the Rendevous room that is being used for registration, schwag bag grabs and vendor tables/booths.

Now that the venue is solid, Brian and I will be putting our heads together on developing a great 2-day program that we’re sure you will all benefit from. A little while ago, I published a poll and survey looking for YOUR feedback on what topics you would like to hear about, what tracks you are likely to attend and general suggestions on how we can make WordCamp Chicago YOUR event – – the poll and survey are still open, so if you have not already – please browse over there to give us your feedback – thank you, in advance!

We are still accepting sponsor contributions for WordCamp Chicago 2010 to help us pay for the costs involved – so if you are interested in sponsoring WordCamp Chicago – please let us know! We’ve already got some great sponsors – so far, ForDummies.com (Wiley Publishing) is our largest sponsor, opting for the Gold sponsorship for WordCamp Chicago – which is great! As many of you know, ForDummies.com (Wiley) is the monster publishing house behind my own books, WordPress For Dummies and BuddyPress For Dummies (which is officially available on Amazon.com as of TODAY) – it is great to see them giving back to the WordPress community! Also, ServerBeach, Margaret Roach and DigitalPure are Copper level sponsors for this year’s event…big thanks to them for their support!

A word about hotels and lodgings in the area: One of the biggest challenges we had in planning this year is that a HUGE convention is going on the same weekend – The American Association for Oncologists. Basically, these guys and gals are taking over downtown Chicago and are having their convention at the McCormick Center. Why am I telling you? Because hotel rooms in downtown Chicago, close to our venue at the Congress Plaza, are going fast…..so book early!

The Congress Plaza, itself, has booked off a block of rooms for WordCamp Chicago attendees, but it is first come, first serve, as they are only holding a block of 100 rooms. During the booking process, let them know you are attending WordCamp Chicago and they will give you their special rate of $229.00 per night. (Note: hotel rooms in downtown Chicago for this weekend are unusually high due to the Oncologist convention – as usual, big cities jack up room rates when a large convention is in town … just because they can.) I am working on putting together a listing of other hotels in the area for you and will post it on our FAQ Page when I have it ready.

A word on WiFi – the hotel has it, but when we told them that this group is 500+ large and every single one of us will want to be online throughout the day, they cringed…not just a little, but a lot. They warned us that their WiFi may not hold up under the pressure. We are currently working on an alternative solution with some local providers in the area – – in the meantime, anyone who has their own portable MiFi, plan on bringing it because, as of right now, we cannot make any predictions as to the stability and uptime of the WiFi at the location. I will keep you updated as we go along – as I said, we are currently working on alternatives.

As the weeks go by and I assemble more and more information – I will post the info you need here in terms of transportation, parking, attractions in the areas, locations of Starbucks close to the venue (well..that’s mostly for Brian…) and any other information you’ll need to make your weekend visit to Chicago a great one!

119 days to go!!!

Posted in Announcements, Blog, Venue and Location, WCChicago 2010 | Tagged Chicago, congress plaza, hotels, venue, wifi, WordCamp | 6 Comments

A Poll: User or Developer Track – or both?

January 25, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off

Because we are planning for two different tracks of panels/presentations, we’d like to get a feel for which track you will most likely spend the most of your time at WordCamp Chicago:

User Track: This track presents information useful for users of the WordPress platform, topics like monetization, using WordPress as a CMS, information on plugins, themes and additional things you can do to extend the basic ‘out of the box’ WordPress platform, news and resources about upcoming changes to the platform (upgrades, etc) and beginner to intermediate level information on making/tweaking your themes and creating simple plugins and widgets.
Developer Track: This track is intended for advanced to guru level developers and covers an array of information about plugin development, hooks, API usage, server level security issues, core commits and theme development (hooks, functions and loops, etc), jQuery, AJAX and more

We realize that most people will bounce between both tracks, depending on the information being presented, but if you had to choose a track where you are most likely to spend the bulk of your time:

Which track are you most likely to spend the bulk of your time at WCChicago(answers)

Lastly, a survey — we’d like to hear from you on the topics and information planned for WordCamp Chicago – we want to make sure that we are presenting information that YOU want to hear and learn – take this quick survey and let us hear your ideas:

View Survey

That’s it for now – – we have a few announcements that will come later this week, including the venue, as we continue planning and plotting over here! Hope you all had a great weekend – – congratulations to our Colts and Saints fans, and our condolences to our Vikings and Jets fans!

Posted in Announcements, Blog, Speakers, WCChicago 2010 | Tagged polls, Speakers, survey, topics | Comments Off

WordCamp Chicago is all over Twitter

January 17, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off

For last year’s WordCamp Chicago – our Campers blew up the official hashtag for the event. Don’t believe me – check out Adria’s twitter update from earlier this month about it:

This year we expect it to be no different – – and here are some WordCamp Chicago Twitter resources for you to follow:

You can follow WordCampChicago on Twitter for all the latest information – This account will be invaluable to attendees leading up to and during the event, as it is where we will broacast all announcements, pre and post parties and meetups and the latest information about the event.
The official hashtag for the event is #wcchicago
There is a WCChicago Twitter Hashtag widget you can install on your WordPress blog to display the latest BUZZ going on about WordCamp Chicago on Twitter – – download the WCChicago Twitter Hashtag plugin here (be sure to rename the file twitterhash.php) – – courtesy of our good friends over at WebDev Studios – thanks guys! (download then upload to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and activate – then add the widget to your sidebar. Easy peasy! here is the CSS we use to style it – feel free to nab and tweak as needed.)
The WordCamp Chicago Attendees list can be viewed on our Registration page – – we also have developed a list on Twitter called WordCampers-Chicago that we will be updating with new people as the registrations continue to fly in.
Interested in knowing who are the generous sponsors of WordCamp Chicago? Check out our WCChicago-Sponsors list on Twitter that will be updated as we obtain sponsorships for the event.
We already have some superb speakers in mind for WordCamp Chicago – but we have not yet developed a completed, official list yet – however, when we do – you can follow our WCChicago-Speakers list on Twitter to follow those folks!
Lastly – your humble organizers of WordCamp Chicago have their own list at WCChicago-Organizers where you can follow the organizers and volunteers for the event.

Hmm…maybe I need to get a Sync – – the tweeting car from Ford???

Posted in Announcements, Blog, WCChicago 2010 | Tagged twiter plugin, twitter, twitter lists | Comments Off

The gift of sponsorship – how you can help

January 16, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off

Over the coming weeks and months, we will be posting all the information you need here for WordCamp Chicago. We are getting really excited about the event – planning it is not only hard work, but it is really a lot of fun, as it gives us the opportunity to reach out and connect with some really fantastic people in the WordPress community.

Right now, during the planning phase of WordCamp Chicago – we are dancing the very creative line between planning a fantastic event for everyone planning to be there while trying to stay within our budget as well. For this reason, I would personally like to invite any interested businesses to contact me with interest in helping sponsor WordCamp Chicago – no contribution is too big, or too small. If your business has benefited from the WordPress platform – now is a perfect time to give back – not too mention it is a fantastic marketing opportunity for your business to reach 500+ WordPress fans within a very desirable demographic – VERY social geeks who actively participate in Internet technology, blogging and social media!

Potential sponsors find it very helpful to know that this year, WordCamp Chicago is officially WordCamp Chicago, Inc – a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, as such, contributions for sponsorship are a federal tax deduction for your business, as well as being a fantastic marketing opportunity, and SEO investment.

All collected sponsorship and ticket sales monies go directly back into the planning and budget of the event in an effort to make it not only a richly educational event for everyone involved, but a fun and exciting networking opportunities for content publishers, small business, freelancers and entrepreneurs within the WordPress community.

Your gift of sponsorship for WordCamp Chicago help us pay for such things as:

Venue rental costs
Catering
Event Insurance
T-shirts, bags and schwag
Equpiment (A/V production, WiFi, Power, etc)
Beverages – coffee, water, soda, juices

Details on sponsorship opportunities can be found on the official WordCamp Chicago Sponsors page, including our Sponsor Information Sheet that details out the tiered sponsorship opportunities we currently have available.

So, what do you think? Would you love to contribute to help make WordCamp Chicago amazing? We would love to hear from you today – – the sooner the better, since we are currently looking to cover the costs of deposits for the venue and equipment contracts for the event! Hit us up on our contact form or contact Lisa Sabin-Wilson directly at lsabin-wilson AT wordcampchicago DOT com – let’s talk about the opportunities and how we can help each other out!