About

The Conference

WordCamp New Zealand is a 1-2 day conference focusing on and around the WordPress platform. It is a global event that has been held 49 times in ’09 everywhere from California to China.

In 2010 so far there have been 17 WordCamps already with another 30 planned – as at early May 2010.  They are designed & organised by locals – see the global WordCamp Schedule here.

Getting to meet other WordPress users is one of the main reasons people attend WordCamps

WordCamp New Zealand 2009 was brought about after several discussions at WordCamp Australia about holding a WordCamp “across the pond” in New Zealand. Three of the Kiwis in attendance quickly started organising the event.

WordCamp New Zealand is organised by the WordCamp Trust of New Zealand. The WordCamp trust was formed in order to create a central hub for the local NZ ( & Aussies) community and encourage networking throughout the wider WordPress community.

For more background on the philosophy behind WordCamps please check the about WordCamp on the Central site.

Organisers

Jason Kemp – DialogCRM on Twitter @dialogCRM
Jason has worked for many years on business development for IP-based companies, especially software. With a background in management consulting, marketing and sales, he spends most of his time helping businesses understand the benefits of open source and WordPress.

Dan Milward – Instinct Entertainment on Twitter @danmilward
Dan Milward is a New Zealand based developer and entrepreneur working with Instinct, makers of (amongst other things) the WP e-Commerce Plugin and the WP Wiki Plugin.

Anthony Cole – on Twitter @anthonycole
Anthony Cole is a freelance web developer and student based in Melbourne, Australia – last year in Dunedin, NZ. He has been involved with the WordPress community for several years, organising several meet-ups in Silicon Valley, San Francisco. and Sydney. In 2008 he helped to organise Wordcamp Australia in Sydney.

WordPress in New Zealand

For such a small country New Zealand has had quite an impact on the greater WordPress scene – from Plugin Development, to WordPress Theme creation tools and of course WordPress powers many of New Zealands best websites. Don’t believe us? Here are just a few:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/blogs/
http://www.soulpurpose.co.nz/
http://www.salient.co.nz/
http://blog.nzx.com
http://topptwins.com/

Thanks to all of you who wrote in to tell us about your sites we’ve listed a few more WordPress based NZ websites over here especially in the comments on that post.