Last-minute changes are always a possibility due to unforeseen circumstances, but this is the plan as it sits right now.

Now that we have all of our speakers confirmed, I’ll be putting the final touches on the exact schedule of who is speaking at what time and on which day. I hope to announce the tentative schedule in the next week or so.

He’s doing it again.

I’m excited to announce that Matt will again attend WordCamp Portland, giving an informal “Town Hall with Matt” presentation where attendees will have a chance to ask questions to the founder of WordPress and Chief BBQ Taste Tester for Automattic.

If you haven’t yet purchased your ticket for WordCamp Portland, I think you now have one more reason to get on that.

Read our full list of speakers including session titles, descriptions, and short biographies.

We’ll be throwing all of those proposals in a blender, flipping the switch, and seeing what flies out.

Not really. This is not ‘nam… this is WordCamp. There are rules. In the next couple of weeks several of the WordCamp Portland organizers will review the proposals and make some decisions about the schedule and speakers. If you submitted a proposal, you should hear from us by the end of the month. Once we have things somewhat formed, we’ll announce the speaker list publicly.

As we get closer to the event we’ll post more details but we have a few great speakers already planned:

• Jane Wells (UX Lead for Automattic), will speak about “How WordPress Decisions Are Made” – a look at how choices are made about the direction and details of WordPress.
• Food Carts Portland is a great resource for Portland’s awesome food cart scene. Brett “Dieselboi” Burmeister will speak about how food carts are using social media as part of (or their entire) marketing efforts.
• Designer/developer Austin Passy of Frosty Web Designs will be talking about design and theming with WordPress – we’re still working out the exact angle on his talk, but expect something visually pleasing.
• Photographer and Blogger Aaron Hockley of Social Photo Talk will present “Are You Cheating On Your Blog? Splitting Time Amongst Social Media Sites” – a look at how to mix and use various social media sites for your brand or identity.

Want to Speak at WordCamp Portland? Read This…

We’re now actively looking for speakers to fill out the rest of our lineup. We’ll again have two full days of conference, meaning we’ll be selecting several more speakers. We might do something different this year… longer presentations should be 45 minutes, but we also might feature shorter 15 minute talks. Topics should revolve around WordPress and blogging (pretty much anything related is fair game). Themes, plugins, authoring, content, legal issues, RSS, voice, writing, database/server admin, you name it….

If you’d like to present at WordCamp Portland, please contact speaker coordinator Aaron Hockley via email (aaron@hockleyphoto.com). Let us know your topic, whether you think it would work best as a longer 45 minute presentation or a quicker 15 minute talk. A short bio/background/links to help us learn about you are also appreciated. We’ll solicit a bunch of ideas and then the organizers will make selections to fill out a well-rounded docket of presentations.

Shayne is owner of S-Tastic Designs where he offers WordPress-related support, design and consulting services. He also works for Instinct Entertainment (makers of WP Ecommerce) providing support and custom modifications. He has presented at several WordCamps this year including Las Vegas, Raleigh and Los Angeles.

Shayne will be presenting on WPMU and Ecommerce.

Saturday’s schedule and order of speakers has changed a bit; see the agenda page for the updated schedule.

I’m sure the topics will go in a variety of directions once the ideas start flowing, but we’d love to have a few starter questions to kick things off. If you’ve got a question you’ve been dying to ask the man behind WordPress, leave it as a comment here. We’ll pick out a few to start the discussion (and anything that doesn’t get chosen is fair game to be asked from the audience).

Some other WordCamps have a talk on SEO, but that wouldn’t be good enough for Portland…. no, we have the SEO Smackdown panel!

We’ll have a couple SEO professionals who think that SEO is very important for every blogger (Scott Hendison and Amber Case), along with a couple bloggers who think that SEO is overrated (Dawn Foster and Rick Turoczy). Moderator Nate DiNiro will ask some pointed questions to our panel along with fielding responses from the audience.

Speaking of interesting speakers… WordPress guru Lorelle VanFossen will join us and present Tags and Categories: Are You Uncategorized? – a look at how tags and categories can be used to both aid blog readers and also drive and maintain traffic on your blog.

Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal: Bondage: How to be your podcast’s Dom, not its Sub

Cami, the host and creator of tech podcast Strange Love Live, is a tattooed, boot wearing, twitter obsessed blogger from Portland, OR. Mike (Dr. Normal), producer and co-creator of Strange Love Live, has created digital media and worked in the high tech industry for over 20 years. Follow Cami and Mike on Twitter.

Will Norris: How NOT to build a WordPress Plugin

Will Norris is a software engineer specializing in identity related protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, and SAML. As a developer on the DiSo Project, he maintains a number of WordPress plugins which implement many of these technologies and seek to enable social interaction between distributed blogs. He lives with his wife in Portland, and can be found online at http://willnorris.com.

Will Norris photo by Scott Kveton, used under Creative Commons