Wordcamp Philippines 2008: Wicked!

Matt and Me

The idea of organizing an event such as Wordcamp is something that would never cross my mind. But being in the almost constant company of a guy named Blogie Robillo, wacky thoughts are inevitable. He gathered the Usual Suspects - Me, Ria, Migs, Winston and said hey, we're doing Wordcamp! Faster than we can say "Whoa, wait a minute!", we already had our individual assignments. We only had 4 months to pull it off. I swear I didn't think we could make it.

Fast-forward to September. Preparations are going crazy. Fortunately, at this point, I only had a slightly minor part in it. My job started way way back when I was tasked to make the event "look good". That means designing the logo, shirts, collaterals, badges and banners. It's not the easiest job in the world, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. My years at Pratt are paying off! Okay, I also had the distinction of being the official Wordcamp chauffeur. Had it not for Manila's horrible traffic, I would have thanked the MMDA and my driving school as well.

Wordcamp Badge

Wordcamp Shirts

September 6, 2008. D-day. I was running a little late. Ria was texting me to come na, now na! I was in charge of the camper registrations which I forgot to mention. Our sponsor, Lane Systems, created a neat little app for us to easily scan camper badges to instantly record the attendance. Cool eh? I arrived at College of Saint Benilde at exactly 830am. A few campers were beginning to pour in while I was setting everything up. Took me under 5 minutes and it's all systems go. The super cool volunteers from the blogosphere and CSB handled the registration like pros.

My friend RJ of Comicgasm said that Jayvee's talk was awesome. Other talks that got great reviews that I heard firsthand were that of Kring Elenzano, Gail Villanueva and Danny Arao. During his interesting talk, Markku Segguera unveiled his Wordpress Strip! plugin which, oddly, isn't available on his site. It's a shame that I wasn't able to sneak into any of the talks. I think I was too busy taking pictures and sleeping in the theater. Kidding aside, I was observing the press conference graced by a few reporters from the Philippine Inquirer and GMA News. I was also helping out with the food preparations. Kudos to Chowking for providing our delicious lunch lauriats and Spot.ph for the yummy and colorful cupcakes! Shoutout to Aileen for working her magic on Chow King! I'm so gonna eat at Chow King now! :p

Chow King Goodies

Spot.ph Cupcakes

An additional shoutout to bloggers that I saw/spoke to: Jay "Sweetie" de Jesus, AJ, Hannah, Ada, Sabrina, Phoebe, Coy, Mica, Jeff and Fiel.

Mighty thanks to our blogger and student volunteers! -- Shari, Gwen, Paul, Arbet, Melo, Jehz, Rein, Chiq, Fritz, Fitz, Jonel, Arpee, the kids from the CSB Computer Business Association and the Association of Information Management led by Luigi Dollosa and Angelique De Leon.

Student Volunteers

More thanks go to fellow organizers Juned Sonido and Dave Quitoriano. You guys rock!

To cap the whole affair off, Matt Mullenweg signs an autograph on the back of my Wordcamp badge.

WICKED!