We are excited to announce our event’s keynote speaker. She is an experienced speaker and a familiar face to those in the WordPress Northeast Ohio community. This year’s keynote speaker is Megan Rose!
Megan is a web developer in the Cleveland area specializing in WordPress. She works for Blackbird Digital, an award-winning digital agency in Willoughby, Ohio.
She co-organizes her local WordPress Meetup, is on the organizing team for WordCamp Northeast Ohio (aka Kent), and volunteers for Cleveland GiveCamp.
Get to know Megan in our Q & A below, in which she shares more about her background and what inspired her keynote session, “Your Place in WordPress.”
What is the topic of your keynote?
The title of my keynote is Your Place in WordPress. I share some thoughts on the online event attendee experience and what I hope our attendees will get from WordCamp Northeast Ohio. And I share some of my hopes and ideas for how attendees can stay connected with the WordPress community beyond our event.
How did you get your start with WordPress?
I started developing with WordPress around 2012 or so, when I learned how to make custom themes in one of my college courses. They weren’t pretty, but I made a handful of terrible sites with WordPress!
I was hired at KHM Travel Group immediately after college. Four months into that job, I convinced my boss to pay for my $40 ticket and a cheap hotel stay for WordCamp Ann Arbor 2014. (It’s funny now to think of the long, professional request I sent and how nervous I was about getting it approved. But hey, we never had a professional development stipend at that point.)
That was when I discovered that there were human beings making this thing and they were talking about it, too!
What got you interested in speaking?
After being a diligent session-attending note-taker and nervous wreck at Ann Arbor in 2014, I decided the easiest way to talk to people at a conference was if they were required to talk to me! I signed up as a volunteer for WordCamp Northeast Ohio 2016.
It was Rich Robinkoff and Steve Grunwell that specifically convinced me to get in front of an audience. They talked me into submitting a talk for WordCamp Columbus, which was a great experience. WCNEO 2016 was a pivotal moment for me.
How do you feel about speaking at virtual events vs. live events? Pros/cons?
I think this debate is as exhausting to me as attending online events is to others. But as an event organizer and frequent volunteer, I truly could go on for days on this topic!
From a speaker perspective though, I think it depends on the talk format.
Virtual events give you a lot of flexibility to engage with the audience one-on-one. This means being able to answer everyone’s questions and being able to easily follow-up with people without needing to exchange information or have people wait in a line to ask questions after a talk.
What I’ve been seeing is that workshop-style talks or complex technical talks do really well as pre-recorded online talks. The speaker can be doing Q&A in the chat during the talk and there are no live coding issues. (Though I’ll admit those moments are humanizing and I’d love to see some speakers leave mistakes in their recordings. – Pobody’s nerfect.)
But obviously, there’s no room for improvisation in pre-recorded talks. And even in live virtual talks, it’s sometimes hard to gauge the audience’s reaction or there’s a delay in the chat. Perfect example – I threw a couple of bits in my talk that I’m not sure will land, but I have to be 100% committed because if the first one doesn’t land, I can’t go back in time and erase the other similar jokes. Major kudos to people who can be funny when no one is watching – I’m not sure that’s me!
With your experience as an organizer of this event, what is special about the NEO WordPress audience?
I don’t think it’s unique to our group, but we’ve always had a big turnout of first-time WordCampers. That’s always exciting to see people discover the community for the first time.
I also think our community in particular is very laid back – everyone has been flexible with the various changes we’ve made with our Meetup venue and formats. And people have been very willing to try out different things when it comes to the online format. It’s nice because we can try new things without worrying about upsetting or alienating people.
What inspired the topic of your keynote session?
Over the last couple years, I’ve been trying to encourage our Meetup and WordCamp attendees to get involved in the greater WordPress community/project. Just about everyone I’ve talked to about contributing seems to think they don’t know enough to be able to contribute or they are intimidated by the thought of talking to the teams.
I’d like to start using our WordCamp and Meetups as an entry point into the rest of the WordPress community. So I’m just trying to reduce any potential barriers and support our group members as best as I can.
Megan’s keynote will kick off WordCamp Northeast Ohio at 1 pm ET on Saturday, May 22nd. View the full event schedule and secure your free registration to our virtual event here.
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