It was a great Weekend, presentations, videos and pictures coming soon.
David Mugo,
Organizer, WordCamp Kenya.
It is a Wrap!
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WordCamp Kenya 2012 is on Today!
Thank you very much to all those who participated in making this day come better. All the speakers, all the sponsor and every attendee. The day is finally here!
Assembly is at Alliance Franchise at 8:30am and we shall proceed to Maanzoni Lodge from 9am. Please be there on time.
For those of you who are on Twitter, the official harsh tag is #WCKE.
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Speaker Spotlight: Moses Kemibaro
Moses Kemibaro
Session Title:Responsive Web Design, Native Mobile Websites and Mobile Apps using WordPress
Description:
Increasing, Internet users globally are using mobile devices as the default mode of going online. In this respect, web sites and blogs need to take into consideration that the web is more often than not mobile and there is a raging debate on how to best tackle this approach using responsive web design, native mobile web sites and mobile apps. This presentation looks at how users of WordPress can take advantage of all of these approaches to reach mobile users effectively and efficiently on a global basis.
Bio:
Moses Kemibaro is an award-winning TechBlogger who rants and raves about all things digital in Africa at MosesKemibaro.com. He is also a thought leader on digital and mobile marketing in Africa, having a professional background of over fifteen years at successful Internet businesses. Currently, Moses is an independent digital marketing consultant based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Until recently, Moses was Director of Sales for InMobi in Africa where he successfully drove mobile advertising sales in key African markets such as Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt. InMobi is the world’s largest independent mobile advertising network that reaches over half a billion users a month and is visible on thousands of mobile sites and mobile apps.
Prior to InMobi, he was the founding Regional Manager at Dealfish East Africa (Now known as OLX Kenya) where he succeeded in making Dealfish the market leader for online classifieds in Kenya and Uganda as well as one of the most popular local web sites on both desktop and mobile.
Before Dealfish, he founded and led Dotsavvy as one of Kenya’s premier full-service digital marketing agencies for close to a decade. During his time at Dotsavvy, he grew the business to become one of East Africa’s most successful digital marketing agencies serving a broad range of leading private and public sector organizations.
Q:Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest? I started using WordPress back in 2007 when I started blogging. I found it easy to use and especially capable for someone like me who is a novice techie. In addition, the ability to use themes and plugins made it perfect from an extensibility point of view. I am still using WordPress since it makes blogging a synch and continues to evolve in-line with market trends and needs.
Q:Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Kenya? I spoke at the 2011 event and wanted to speak again this year. For me, I am passionate about WordPress since I use it for my blogging which has become an important part of my professional and personal identity. In addition, I am enthusiastic about sharing my experiences and tips on using WordPress for blogging as well as business.
Q;What is your talk going to be about? I am going to talk about using WordPress to reach mobile users globally. In particular, I will talk about how you can use WordPress via responsive web design, native mobile web sites and mobile apps, all at the same time. This is especially important in markets such as Kenya and Africa where Internet usage is largely mobile.
Q:What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk? I want them to understand from a practical point of view how they can use WordPress to “mobilize” their blogs and web sites using the highly versatile capabilities and technologies available.
Q:What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why? I recently upgraded from K2 to CatchBox. Both of these are free themes. I moved to CatchBox because it is a responsive web design theme. In addition, I love plugins like Akismet that enable me to manage the large amounts of SPAM that can come to your blog.
Q:Can you share one WP tip with us? It is really really easy to use freely available themes and plugins to make your blog or web site mobile capable compared to other content management systems (CMS) on the market. This alone makes WordPress the perfect blogging and web site CMS.
Q:What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Kenya 2012? I am looking forward to meeting and networking with other WordPress bloggera and enthusiasts.
Q:Do you make money from wordpress? I have adsense running and this makes me some money, but not much.
Q:Is WordPress an effective platform for getting your message across? Absolutely! I reach thousands of people every month via my blog that runs on WordPress.
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Speaker Spotlight: Phillip Ogola
Session Title: RedCross and Social Media
Description: How RedCross uses Social Media to report emergencies Real Time.
Bio:
Philip Ogola is the Social Media Head at @KenyaRedCross, the brainchild behind the #iVolunteer campaign. Through the Campaign @KenyaRedC ross can now respond to disaster real time after getting alerts via twitter or facebook. Kenya Red Cross won BAKE Awards Best Tweep Corporate for best use of social media. Working at Kenya Red Cross is a CALLING
Worked at Gina Din Corporate Communications as Social Media Consultant where he spearheaded the formation of a fully fledged Social Media Department.
Philip Ogola is a Director at TimeOut Media Ltd has consulted social media strategies for some of the best-known brands in Kenya Nokia East Africa, Nestle, IMG PR and Events , CIC Insurance Group, ZUKU Kenya, G4S Kenya. MTV SHUGA, UNAIDS #Crowd Out Campaign.
Philip is a passionate about HIV/AIDS and Road Safety.
Q:Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Kenya?
Working at Red Cross completely changed my life, it’s became a calling saving lives through social media, that one tweet, or blog post can save lives. I want to share my experience to bloggers as they play a pivotal role in information dissemination and also learn about WordPress
Q:What is your talk going to be about?
How Kenya Red Cross uses social media disseminate information and receive user feedback real time and post news Alert as they happen. I will focus on the #iVolunteer who are Red Cross Virtual Volunteers on social media , who report emergency real time thereby increasing response time and to help Prevent, Prepare for and Respond to emergencies faster.
Q:What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk
That we can make positive change by what we post on Social Media or on our blogs.
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Speaker Spotlight: Kelvin Jayanoris
Session Title:How To Build a WordPress Plugin in 10 Minutes
Description: A short introduction to building WordPress plugins to solve probrems.
Bio:
My name is Kelvin Jayanoris. I’m 25 and an accountant by training. I stumbled upon WordPress when I quit Deloitte to start my own company. I got into web design because I was looking for something to do and suddenly got a whole lot of people needing sites. My first business after Deloitte: www.nickelpro.com
While working with WordPress we hit a point in time when we needed to create lots of online shops. We wanted to use WordPress but got really bad experiences with the available ecommece plugins so we wrote DukaPress. We open sourced it because we felt that others could benefit. However, the response was so much that we decided to launch dukapress.org, dukapress.com and madoido.com to try and make a business of it.
Q:Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest? I became interested in WordPress after having run a Blogger.com blog for a couple of years and beign frustrated by not being able to have total control over my site.
Q:Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Kenya? I would like to encourage more developers to look into using WordPress for their projects.
Q:What is your talk going to be about? It is going to be a simple introduction to building WordPress plugins.
Q:What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk? I want them to realise that WordPress is for more than just blogging.
Q:What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why? My favorite plugin is WP Contact Form 7. I love it as I have been able to use it for literally everything that needs user input very easily.
Q:Can you share one WP tip with us? Need anything from your WordPress site? There’s a plugin for it!
Q:What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Kenya 2012? I’m looking forward to meeting other WordPress enthusiasts
Q:Do you make money from wordpress? Yes.
Q:Is WordPress an effective platform for getting your message across? Yes.
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Speaker Spotlight- Gloria Mangi
Session Title & Description: Progressive Pan Africanism
Description:I want to share on Pan Africanism its history and where we stand today and what it can mean for our future.
Bio:
| Gloria MANGI, a 2012 Milead Fellow, is what many would call a citizen of the world. Having grown up in Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, and California, she came back to her home country Tanzania with a fire and passion to make a difference especially in the world of media. Having studied communications and intercultural studies at Fresno Pacific University, Gloria has done everything from acting, TV, radio, writing, event planning and reporting, and much more. She believes that through positive and quality media, we can influence the direction of a nation. In 2010 she produced and directed a successful TV talk show that dealt with social issues in Tanzania and revolutionized the Tanzanian mainstream media. She is a part of a network known as the Smart 29ers who are currently working with the Tanzanian government to arrange a national dialogue and an international dialogue in the coming year to discuss issues hindering the development of our nation. She is also a member of the Tanzanian branch of Africa 2.0 network which is a “Pan-African civil society organization that consists of over 300 young and emerging leaders from Africa and the Diaspora who share a collective vision for Africa and a commitment to finding and implementing sustainable solutions capable of leapfrogging the development of the continent |
Q:Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest?
I became interested in WordPress when I wanted to start a blog. So I researched on the different platforms and though locally wordpress was not a popular platform to use in relation to blogging, it seemed that it ranked high internationally. Once I started using it, I haven’t looked back since. One of the things I really enjoy about wordpress is being able to use different templates and backgrounds and customizing it to what best represents me or what I am trying to portray.
Q:Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Kenya?
Aside from the fact of being a wordpress user and hearing about WordCamp Kenya for a little while now, I think what set apart this one for me was the fact that it is happening before the national elections take place and the theme is centers around that. I feel it is my responsibility as both a blogger and a journalist to be a part of this in whatever capacity that plays out.
Q:What is your talk going to be about?
I want to talk about the rise of Pan Africanism through the eyes of a blogger.
Q:What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
I want people to capture what the true essence of pan africanism is and the ideologies behind it.
Q:What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why?
My favorite wordpress theme is Modularity Lite because I like how I can have a slideshow of selected pictures and the way I can customize the header on top with any image I want.
Q:Can you share one WP tip with us?
For any blog post that you do, make sure you put tags relevant to whatever you posted about to make it easier to find when someone searches for those terms in a search engine.
Q: What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Kenya 2012?
I think I am looking forward to the networking as well as the other talks and learning from other wordpress users
Q:Is WordPress an effective platform for getting your message across?
I believe it is.
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Speaker Spotlight: Adeola Kayode
Session title: SOLOMO: Marketing Tactics for Bloggers and Brands
Description:
The convergence of social, mobile and localization trends are already helping brands position themselves accurately. With statistics saying there is easier access to telephones than computers in Africa, the future is already mobile. The rapid adoption of mobile and Google’s positioning to favour local searches is a big win for SMEs and even big Brands can also partake…
Bio:
Deola Kayode is the founder of Teleios Consulting, a brand strategy and digital media consulting company. He also serves as the Principal of TOMA ( Teleios Online Marketing Academy) responsible for training and development of skill sets in online marketing, social media and mobile. He runs MarketingMiyagi which focuses on all aspects of online/digital media marketing and www.adeolakayode.com where He also provides thought leadership on issues surrounding online PR, Social Media and Branding. He was awarded the 2011 Social Media Thought leader of the year (www.sowambe.com – Nigeria) and one of the consuls of www.socialbakers.com. Since he owns MarketingMiyagi, you won’t be surprised when he’s not online, he’s either into Public Speaking/Training or training in a Martial Arts Dojang. You can find him on twitter – @delola.
Deola Kayode will be giving a talk titled ‘’SOLOMO: Strategies for Bloggers and Brands’’
Q: Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest?
As the most popular of all CMS, it has given most people the power to communicate value to the entire world and more importantly their predefined target audience. It has continued to help SMEs leverage on content creation without the hassle of coding and pricing. My continued interest has continued to rise as WordPress moves from just a blog development platform to a being a tool to drive business and footprint objectives. Need I say more?
Q: Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Kenya?
It will be great to meet bloggers and developers in other countries and most especially Africa. We can cross-fertilize ideas and thoughts while learning from one another.
Q: What is your talk going to be about?
A recent research result from Socialbakers say of the 10 top countries with the highest mobile penetration rate in the world, 9 of them are African Countries. We therefore need to recognise the future is mobile and thus pay attention to mobile traffic, mobile transactions and possibilities. SoLoMo – Social, Local and Mobile techniques for building and marketing businesses and brands. How can bloggers take care of their mobile audience? How do businesses use localisation techniques to harness search and social traffic
Q:What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
Bloggers – Unbounce your mobile traffic
Business bloggers – take advantage of localisation and integrated approach to social media for their businesses
Brands – How to leverage bloggers to build brand loyalty
Q: What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why?
WordPress SEO by Yoast – who doesn’t know why. It essentially a complete plug-in for SEO and more so; it is about 4 plug-ins in one!
Q: What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Kenya 2012?
New Country, New people, Fresh community
Q: Do you make money from wordpress?
Google Adsense, Guest articles, Consulting offers
Q:Is WordPress an effective platform for getting your message across?
Yes and yes again!
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Speaker Spotlight: Njeri Wangarĩ – Wanjohi
Njeri Wangari-Wanjohi
Session Title: Has technology changed the way we write; what is the future for creative writing?
Description:
Being a creative writer, alot has changed from using a typewriter. We look at ways in which technology has changed the way writers write, publish, market and get feedback for their works. Will ebooks mean the death of hardcopy books as we know them?
Bio:
Njeri Wangarĩ – Wanjohi, is a multi talented published Poet and performer, IT specialist and arts blogger.Njeri’s love for the arts began at an early age through her appreciation of African culture. This, she found to be well expressed in many of the books that she started reading while still young and they have shaped the person she has now become.
She penned her first poem in 2004. Three years later she made her first attempt in front of an audience, performing her poetry. She is now among the most talented Kenyan poets and performers.
Njeri Wangare has come to be known as the voice of reason and change in the Kenyan poetry circles due to the content and theme of her poems which range from Culture, religion, human rights, technology and everyday challenges in the Kenyan society.
Apart from Poetry, Njeri is also an ardent blogger. She has been running her blog, www.Kenyanpoet.com for over 6 years now – a project that she initially started as a platform to publishing her poetry online. It has since grown to incorporate other forms of art as well as host other poets. She has contributed immensely to the promotion of Kenyan Poetry not only on stage but also through the internet through her reviews on art performances and by encouraging up and coming poets to start blogs and eventually share their work through performance. She is currently an author with Global Voices Online-An online portal for citizen journalists, as a writer on African Arts.
Njeri performs regularly at various poetry spots in Kenya’s capital city Nairobi as well as in institutions and companies where is invited from time to time.
Njeri also co-founded POWO(Poets and Writers Online) an NGO that seeks to equip creative writers with technology skills to thrive online through workshops and talks by leading figures in writing and in IT.
Her book, Mines and Mind Fields, My Spoken Words is available in all leading bookshops in Nairobi as well as on Amazon.
When not performing or blogging, Njeri is a Systems Administrater with East African Publishers.
Q: Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest?
I had been running my blog on blogger for 4 years and I felt that it was time to move to a self hosted domain but still retain the blog look and feel albeit with more features. Only wordpress could give me this freedom. I was able to use the migrate tool to move all my posts(over 500 of them) and the comments without any difficulty. I have been running my blog on wordpress for 2 years now. I hate coding and wordpress understands that(saving me all the html jargon) I especially love the widgets that I have been able to integrate into my blog.
Q: Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Kenya?
I would like to share my story as well as my experience in running POWO. Alot of Kenyan writers do not know how to use the many free tools available online in their writing. I would like to talk about how POWO has impacted the lives of Creative writers and what it seeks to do in encouraging more writers to go online.
Q: What is your talk going to be about?
Creative Writing and Technology, what is the future?
Q: What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
The immense contribution that creative writers are making in creation of local content.
Q: What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why?
Twitter BlackBird Pie – I am able to quote twitter updates as part of my posts with ease.
Q: What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Kenya 2012?
Learning something new from those attending
Q: Is WordPress an effective platform for getting your message across?
Yes, its quite effective.
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Speaker Spotlight: Isaac Keyet
Isaac Keyet at a previous WordCamp Session
Talk title: Mobile WordPress
Description:
An introduction to WordPress’ official, Open Source apps for various platforms and the how to best manage your website while on the go. There are many ways to make websites work better on mobile devices, we’ll talk about a few options and discuss best practices.
Bio:
As a team lead and designer for the Mobile Team at Automattic, Isaac helps plan and design the official open source WordPress apps. Each month, over half a million posts are published from these apps on WordPress.com alone. Co-founded IntenseDebate back in the day and is a TechStars ’07 alumni. Swedish. Likes coffee, road trips, and temperatures above freezing.
WordCamp Kenya Interview:
Q: Tell us about yourself:
Isaac is a Swedish designer turned team lead who’s working closely with the WordPress community to create the best possible WordPress apps for an array of different platforms. Working at Automattic since 4 years, he travels a lot and enjoys visiting new places and meeting new people. In the past Isaac has freelanced as a web designer, founded a web start up, and is a 2007 TechStars alumni. He enjoys adrenaline kicks like driving gokarts and recently skydove for the first time.
Q: Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest?
WordPress democratizes publishing and is the future of the Web. That’s something worth fighting for.
Q: Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Kenya?
Always wanted to go to Kenya so that was a big reason, but mobile is so big in many African countries that it just made sense to go to learn more.
Q: What is your talk going to be about?
My talk is going to be about the official WordPress apps, what you can do with them, other ways to simplify mobile WordPress management, things to think about when creating websites for the “mobile web”, and some of the things currently being mapped out for core WordPress to simplify mobile management.
Q: What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
There is only one web, just different devices connecting to it. Don’t ever design for a specific device or browser, design for the web.
Q: What is your favourite WordPress theme and/ or plugin, and why?
Underscores is a great starter theme from some of the best themers around Automattic.
Akismet is still the best plugin to get rid of spam.
Q: Can you share one WP tip with us?
If you have mobile device with a touch screen, enable “Accessibility Mode” in Screen Options to be able to do most things in the admin (works around drag-and-drop limitations).
Q:What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Kenya 2012?
Meeting everyone!
Q: Do you make money from wordpress (always capitalize “WordPress”!) ?
Yes, I’m employed by Automattic which runs WordPress.com and other services based on or around WordPress.
Q: Is WordPress an effective platform for getting your message across?
WordPress is the most powerful publishing tool this planet has yet seen.
Q:Do you blog?
I want to blog more professionally on isaackeyet.com, but I do have one or two casual blogs that I post on.
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What to Expect at WordCamp Kenya 2012
WordCamp Kenya will be taking place on 10th and 11th November 2012 and it is just slightly over a month away. As usual, it is a great place to learn your way around WordPress, online publishing, blogging and more so getting a little technical on some of the things WordPress allows you to do like a web pro without really having to touch on any code.
The theme for this year is responsible blogging and positive social media influence and for sure, this theme comes at a time when Kenyans really need to embrace these virtues as we head to the next general elections. We have in just one year seen two bloggers arrested in connection with their blogs and while we try to shape an industry that is still very green in Kenya, we need to show responsibility. Kenyans online are more and more each day as the cost of internet access heavily drops, making the internet a great player in the influence of opinion, both in the urban and rural setups.
The great lineup of speakers will speak on many broad topics but the concentration will be on responsibility.
There will be an evening of fun on Saturday 10th as Orange Kenya hosts us for a fireside dinner and cocktail, with performances from poets like Wamathai and Njeri Wangare. There will be DJ Raidar on the decks to keep it going on, long after the cocktail.
WordCamp tickets are selling at Kshs. 4,000 and are available here. This covers your accommodation at Maanzoni Lodge (shared), meals and soft drinks for 2 days, conference, transport from the city center and goodies from WordCamp Kenya 2012.
See you there, get your ticket before they run out.
