WordCamp Houston Keynote: Matt Mullenweg, founder WordPress + Automattic
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Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs much of this site and millions of other sites around the world. The website says WordPress is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform” but more importantly WordPress is a part of who he is. Like eating, breathing, music, he can’t not work on WordPress. The project touches a lot of people, something he’s recently begun to appreciate. He considers himself very lucky to be able to work on something he loves so much. He wrote the foreword to and theFrench WordPress book |
Business Track
 Kelsey Ruger is an accomplished executive with solid experience in web engineering, user experience design, information architecture and web marketing. He has been building web and interactive solutions for more than a decade and has lent his expertise to high profile Internet projects at Prodigy, SBC (now AT&T) and a number of successful start-ups. Kelsey is currently the Vice President of Operations for Houston based digital consultancy ChaiONE. Kelsey oversees the company’s overall strategic & creative vision, directs its corporate operations, and oversees UX, design and technology for North America and India. Kelsey’s personal mantra is “think, try, teach” and he loves “building things for people”. Simply put, he’s a creative guy who helps design focused solutions that fix problems while providing a useful, significant experience. He shares his passion for creativity, design and leadership on his blog and as the Interactive Director for . |
 John-Michael Oswalt, better known as JMO (like Jay-Lo), is an engineer with a passion for the web. A Texas native and Aggie, JMO has been using Wordpress for four years to log his thoughts, ideas, goals, and general take on things. His experience in coding and design dates back to his years at Texas A&M where he built a member database website and web application for a large student organization. JMO’s recent experience has been with search engine optimization and becoming certified for Google Analytics. JMO works at Schipul as a member of the Search Engine Optimization team. He writes on the Schipul Blog, , and regularly. |
 Grace Rodriquez is President of AYN Brand, an Interactive Branding Strategies and Promotional Solutions company based in Houston, Texas. An accomplished media and communications professional, Grace has achieved recognition as a winner of the Texas Statesman Social Media Award, , Producer of the , Editor of (2004, Houston Press), and a sought-after speaker on Social Media Strategy and Community Development. She specializes in interactive branding and experiential marketing that integrates new technologies with grassroots strategies to build awareness and engaged communities for growing businesses, non-profit organizations, artists, and political candidates. |
 Roby Fitzhenry, is the Founder and Creative Director at "Rob Bob" learned to paint from his grandma at a young age and grew up in his dad's print shop. This may have something to do with his ninja design abilities. At work, Roby's hat collection: The Sales Guy, The Lead Creative Guy, and the Client Relations Guy. Outside of work (if there is such a thing), he's more into sci-fi & post-apocalyptic plots than you might care to know and enjoys playing hide-and-seek with his wallet. .com |
Celinda Provost began her 15-year career in Texas politics when she helped coordinate surrogate press conferences for Governor Ann Richards. Between stints as a staff member in the Texas Senate and the Texas House of Representatives, Celinda worked as as field director then statewide program director for House Speaker Pete Laney’s Political Action Committee. She ran successful campaigns for State Representative Allan Ritter of Nederland and State Representative Mark Strama of Austin. Celinda served as chief of staff to Austin State Senator Kirk Watson before retiring from the capitol to launch Net Victories - a new media political consulting firm that specializes in website development and online campaign strategies | Dan Joyce is the social networking and new media specialist at Net Victories. Dan first became involved in politics in 2008 as a field organizer in HD 134 for the Obama for America campaign. In 2009, he was a founding member of the Bill White for Texas Outreach Coalition, where he was instrumental in launching the social media outreach for the campaign. Dan’s experience in both the political and social media sectors help ensure the clients of Net Victories are equipped with the most advanced technology and applications that make for a strong and effective social media campaign. |
| Dan Derozier has been interested in politics and political communication since his days at Rice University in Houston, where he served on the editorial board and as editorial cartoonist for the student newspaper, the Rice Thresher. Since then, Dan has put his political science degree to work: first as a staff assistant to the U.S. Senate Rules Committee, then as the Youth Outreach Director and New Media Coordinator for the 2008 Harris County Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign. In 2009 Dan became technology director at Net Victories, where he has designed websites and helped craft online strategy for dozens of political candidates, non-profits and advocacy groups. |
Blogger Track
 Monica Danna is a marketing and public relations consultant who specializes in holistic marketing strategies for businesses. Monica has spent much of her career in the energy industry as a software marketing specialist. Before beginning her agency, colab, she held the position of social media manager for Halliburton and its various subsidiaries. Monica helps clients add new technology tactics to traditional marketing methods in order to achieve the optimal marketing mix. Most recently Monica worked with Texas gubernatorial candidate Bill White developing his social media campaign. Find her blogging atcosmopolitician.com or twittering away as . |
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 David Stagg has been toying around on the Internet since Everything Zen was still a cool record to listen to. Having used WordPress since its inception in 2003, it is his favorite platform to use to power websites. He is a modernist and a minimalist. David: is a horror movie fan, likes to spend any free moment at the ballpark, is attempting to like hockey, still loves the Astros, is learning how to cook but still can’t eat seafood, and doesn’t have a senior picture in the yearbook because he forgot to take his picture on picture day. David is the Creative Director at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company. |
 Amanda Hansen oversees the public relations and social media arm of (MMI). For the last 14 years, she has distinguished herself through high-quality, consistent and creative delivery of her work that results in national exposure and new business for her clients. Amanda's areas of expertise include financial and professional services, healthcare and real estate, having managed programs for companies such as TIAA-CREF, Military OneSource and MD Anderson. She has been recognized for her work with awards from the Public Relations Society of America, Houston Advertising Federation and Healthcare Advertising. Amanda manages and contributes to the agency blog mmihouston.com. |
 Lauren McKechnie earned a BS in Advertising from University of Texas in the prestigious Texas Creative Program. Lauren currently works at in public relations, where she develops strategy for brands as they enter the social media world, as well as develops and manages content on the agency blog mmihouston.com. Her clients include Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille, Memorial City Mall, MD Anderson and Sugar Land Town Square. Prior to working at Marion, Montgomery Inc., she worked at LatinWorks in Austin, TX, developing creative concepts and copy for Bud Light, Domino’s Pizza and ESPN Deportes. In her downtime, she maintains a personal blog at and paints. |
 Matthew Wettergreen is an engineer, educator and community strategist. He holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering and is an expert in the field of rapid prototyping; over the past ten years, he has been working with these technologies to design tissue-engineered scaffolds for organ replacement. Not only is he a professor at Rice University, Matthew is the co-founder of , a co-working space in Houston, and Do713.com, a comprehensive events aggregator for Houston. Matthew’s specialties lie in employing the engineering design process, developing multi-disciplinary approaches to problem solving, and building community education-based models and forums for discussion. With these, he creates opportunities for individuals and communities, increasing success through collaboration and resource sharing. An accomplished public speaker, Matthew shares his knowledge and insights by speaking at conferences in his various fields. |
| Dean Betz is the content director of , the Houston Chronicle's Web site. He helps manage producers who maintain the site, work on partnerships with bloggers and other media organizations, and advocate for digital media in our newsroom. Betz came to Houston in 2005 from New Jersey, where he was editor of NJ.com, the Web site of the Newark Star-Ledger, and two smaller news Web sites in the Northeast owned by Advance Internet, the Web publishing arm of the Newhouse newspapers. NJ.com was an early adopter of community blog networks; who in 2003 had a network of 30 bloggers across the state. Betz started in the news business in 1985 as a print reporter and editor in upstate New York, and moved to the online side of the business in 1996. |
Developer Track
 Aaron Brazell is the author of the WordPress Bible (Wiley), the Lead Editor of Technosailor.com and has worked on a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors. He has been an active member of the WordPress community since 2004 as a developer, user and consultant. He has advised small- and medium-sized businesses (and on occasion, an enterprise, educational institution or non-profit organization and even the military!) on innovative WordPress and social marketing solutions and guides them in strategy and business decisions pertaining to their endeavors. |
 Bill Erickson is a WordPress Consultant, an entrepreneur, an amateur photograher, a recent college graduate, a skiier, a net native, and an Australian (if living there for three years counts). Here’s some articles about Bill. Bill’s passion is building sites that are easy-to-use and hard-to-break. He create elegant solutions to complex problems. See his blog and portfolio for examples. He’s a founder and resident of a coworking space in Downtown Bryan called The Creative Space. Bill is also a founder of the BIL Conference, a free unconference run in conjunction with TED. |
 Chris Everson is a web designer and developer with an obsession with logic. When he’s not busy collecting records, eating copious amounts of food, fiddling with a guitar or golfing, your best chance on finding him is by heading to your nearest dark corner where he’s sure to be curled up on the floor muttering to himself about user experience and the beauty in design simplicity. East coast born, west coast raised, he now makes Houston his home where he is a founding partner and director of web services at and irregularly maintains a blog at chriseverson.net. And yes, he operates the twitter machine as . |
 Stephanie Leary is a web developer for Texas A&M University, where she manages a dozen departments' and organizations' sites in WordPress. She is a cofounder of Uweb, a grassroots organization for web education and advocacy on campus. She is co-owner of Paged Media, a freelance business catering to authors and other publishing professionals. Her book, Beginning WordPress 3, was released in June from Apress. |
 Chris Olbekson is a native Houstonian and self proclaimed technology geek. He got hooked on computers when he learned how to write programs in Apple Basic and ran his own BBS when he was in high school. Now he is a end to end web developer for his company, C3M Digital, who just launched WP-Performance, a specialized WordPress consulting and support business. When Chris isn’t working on client websites he spends his time supporting the WordPress community on the WP.org support forums and is a member of the WP.org theme review team. You can also find him on Twitter @Chris_Olbekson |
Case Studies
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Client: Andrea White Author & Political Spouse  Challenge: The purpose of the Passionate Supporter Blog was to create a blog that supported Bill White's senate-turned-gubienatorial campaign, provided excerpts from Passion Supporter Book, and aligned with other social media campaign efforts. Challenges faced include time and resource management, content organization, campaign approval, definition of content boundaries. |
Project Lead: Monica Danna Founder, colab
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Client: Susan Saurage Saurage Marketing Research Challenge: The biggest challenge faced by Susan in the beginning was that she had a site that was hard to maintain and even harder to organize. If you want to simplify it, she had a problem with ease of use and content organization/differentiation. |
Project Lead: Derek Key Schipul - The Web Marketing Company 
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Client: AIDS Foundation Houston Challenge: Participants of AIDS Foundation Houston’s Camp Hope and UniversalTeens deal issues far beyond those of a “normal” teenagers. Most come from families that earn $10,000 or less annually, many survive in violent environments and all are living with HIV. Positive Outlook Blog was developed to meet a perceived need for an outlet that allowed young participants of AFH’s programs to creatively and productively convey their experiences, both during camp and their “normal” lives. |
Project Team: Marc Cohen, AFH  Courtenay Siegfried, 20K Group  Chris Valdez, Primer Grey 
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Client: University of Houston Housing Challenge: Responsible for the well-being of thousands of students and visitors, UH’s Residential Life and Housing (RLH) team was in need of a web solution that would allow them to focus their time and resources on people, not technology. Leading the university in social media, the RLH team needed a way to streamline and deliver content from their team of RA and campus Twitterati. With WordPress and the WP Ninjas at MMI, all this plus linking up their non-PHP, legacy calendaring system was a snap. |
Project Lead: Elisa Holland, Marion Montgomery
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Client: Houston Museum of Natural Science Challenge: Start a blog that takes all the cool, insider, behind-the-scenes science stuff that happens here at the Museum every day and shares it with…everyone, from a prospective visitor to someone raising katydids in Japan. Tell the story of an institution that presents everything from dinosaur fossils to hissing cockroaches; organize 30+ curators, staff and visiting experts into a single system that represents their individual voices but also provides a cohesive narrative for the organization; inspire contributors to continue creating compelling content month-after-month; find new voices to represent different corners of the museum; build and spread the Museum’s reputation online and around the world; and integrate it all into our overall social media and marketing strategy. |
Project Team: Marc Belcher  Erin Flis  Ivan Perez 
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