WordPress Development Hangouts (hi)story

We had a great discussion with Marko Heijnen yesterday recorded in our WordPress Developers community on Google+. It was the fourth video we record with active WordPress community members so I thought that it’s time to set a playlist with our WordPress videos and also shed some light on the overall idea.

History

The WordPress Developers community was created on Dec 7 2012, a day after Google announced their new Communities feature. It was yet another place for WordPress people to ‘hang out’, still as an Open Source person myself I’m running Android on my phone and the Google integration comes by default which makes it easier to track and process any sort of information in a bundled applications, cleaner mobile view.

We had two fairly unsuccessful hangout attempts in December and January. My initial idea was to get various people joining the hangout so that we could discus news around WordPress – new releases, upcoming features, company ventures, beta products or anything like that. By that time people were not really interested in that. I realize that time zone difference matters, at first I was setting two or three sample dates 2 weeks ahead open for ‘voting’ for timing as well, but even now scheduling 30 or 60min with someone across the ocean is not an easy job to do, what’s left for getting 6-8-10 people in the same place, same time when everyone is busy with his/her own business. 🙂

So, to set the ground, our dearest moderators were willing to join the first shows. We had Pippin and Franz joining show #1, then Toscho revealed his real face identity in #2 which was a big win for us! Kovshenin is a bit busy for now, so show #3 was with The WP Ninjas and latest official show had Marko as our guest.

Offtopic: I found WPwatercooler and Matt Report at some later point of time, somewhere after the first hangout that went live, so it’s not a copycat attempt – I’ve been trying a few times to work on podcasts, active blogging or videocasting and I’m really glad that better and more active shows do exist!

The concept is having an informal talk, just a casual (you might even say a bit underground) ‘hangout’ as most of that happens remotely in out-of-business-hours timing (normally at home) and guests usually present their work and ventures, related to contributing to WordPress, leading some communities/groups, building themes or plugins etc. First show went live on Feb 18, and for now we manage to record one hangout a month (hopefully we could keep the progress or improve it up to twice a month at some point of time).

Want to hang out?

If you are, or are related to, active community members that would like to share their WordPress experience and inspire the audience, feel free to get in touch with me and we could try to schedule a hangout for one of the next shows. Again, it’s totally casual, you might be near the beach with a Margarita in one hand and cigar in the other, as long as we discuss WordPress related topics. If you are not a member of the WordPress Community yet, feel free to join and contribute by answering development-oriented questions or sharing resources on development, conventions, deployments or related news.

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