Sponsor Wrangler Maddy Osman talks with Patrick Rauland, Lead Organizer of WordCamp Denver and sponsor representative for Nexcess.
We talked about Patrick’s role at WordCamp and Nexcess, how the company’s events team is adapting to a virtual landscape, and some of the fun things they’re planning for WordCamp Denver.
(Unedited) Transcript:
Hello.
I am Maddie Osman, the sponsor Wrangler for word camp Denver 2020.
I’m here with Patrick Roland, who is not only the lead organizer of where he camp Denver 2020, but also works for a company who’s also a sponsor.
Patrick, would you like to just say a couple words about who you are and who you’re representing today?
Yeah.
My name is Patrick Rolland and this is my second year being the lead organizer for WordCamp Denver.
I’m very excited to do so.
I work, I just, this year got a job working for nexus, which does really awesome hosting for WordPress WooCommerce and Magento sites.
for those of you who may be don’t know, nexus is affiliated with liquid web.
it’s a, it’s like a sub brand is my understanding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Liquid lab is the parent and the neck because this is just focused on WordPress, WooCommerce and Magento.
Cool.
we’ll mostly be talking about nexus today.
my first question for you, Patrick, is why did you choose to start working with nexus?
I got excited about nexus actually, because originally way back in the day, liquid web was the very first company to have a managed WooCommerce hosting package.
they moved that over to nexus, but I’m just a, such a big fan of WooCommerce.
I’m such a big fan of people being able to start their own businesses, being able to run their own eCommerce store and someone who designs a hosting plan just for WooCommerce is someone that I want.
that’s a project that I want to bring into the world because I think it helps like all of humanity.
I will, I was very excited to work with nexus to help make, manage WooCommerce hosting even better.
For, for people who are watching this, who don’t know, Patrick has a very long history in e-commerce in woo commerce specifically, he has done some classes for LinkedIn learning.
He used to work for Rue themes, which was then acquired by automatic.
it goes back pretty far for Patrick.
can you speak to nexus his involvement in the WordPress, the word camp specifically community?
Yeah, so we are global sponsors, so we sponsor all of the word camps.
I think it might be North America.
It might be the U S I need to double check, but we’re global sponsors because we want to see as many of these work camps as possible.
we also have lots of us are WordPress professionals that love talking at work camps.
there’s a bunch of people at nexus with names that you’re probably familiar with.
so we have just Frick.
We have Christie cheeriness.
We have myself, we have mental Kurland, and Chris lemme, right? So we have a whole and many more.
we have a whole bunch of people that love to go to word camps, speak at word camps, and even just go as attendees and talk with people.
Well so we love open source.
If you noticed, WordPress will commerce, Magento are all open source.
We love open source and helping build those communities.
that’s what we love doing with word camps.
So, and you’ve kind of touched on this, but anything else you want to say about why it’s important for this brand to be active in this community?
Yeah, so we love, we’re oppressed because they’re the people around us and like the community is the people that we serve, right? So we, when we go to word camps, we’re talking to our customers or future customers.
it’s a great way for us to communicate with customers.
We don’t want to be like a faceless organization.
We want to know our customers and we want to, if someone has a problem, there’s a problem with our software.
We want to hear about it, a word camp, and then bring it back to our engineering team and fix it.
hopefully at the next bird camp we see you, that problem has gone and our software becomes better.
it’s about, it’s about helping you understanding you so that we can make our own software better.
Yeah.
I think that’s a really good point to bring up, which is just that both from an attendee and a sponsor perspective, there’s a lot of mutually beneficial things that can happen from attending word camps.
interestingly, this year though, which is that we have had to take things virtual, a lot of word camps are doing this.
In fact, we are not the first, but how has that affected nexuses ability to stay in touch with this community?
So it’s COVID-19 is crazy.
It’s it’s an, I don’t wanna say unprecedented, but it’s the first time in a hundred years where we’ve had any pandemic.
it is not something were prepared for.
we have, an events team and we go to word camps.
We have people that go to word camps and we set up a booth, so that it is much harder for us to communicate with our community, talk with the open source community.
So we are doing some things, right.
We’re we’re running some webinars on our site.
We’re talking about marketing and we’re even getting ready to start talking about like black Friday months before we need to.
so we are doing some online things.
I know for me personally, I spoke at the local Denver WordPress meetup group about e-commerce and about how you can run an online business in the time of a pandemic.
We’re just taking as much of it online as we can, but it’s really hard.
we seeing people’s faces when we chat.
Like I, I do webinars often, or at least zoom meetings like this, but, I’m only seeing your face, Maddie.
I’m not seeing our end.
Customer’s faces.
That’s hard.
we’re going to keep trying to do online events, but we want to try to get, as we want to try to meet people again.
we’re gonna try to come up with more interactive ways of doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it was definitely interesting when were starting to think about what to do for word camp Denver this year.
Some of the things that we even considered in terms of like smaller groups or how could we make that happen? so getting back to word camp Denver and your involvement, what possessed you to want to be lead organizer?
Okay, good question.
Because it is a bunch of work.
I feel like WordPress has given me the life that I have now, the profession that I have had the career that I have now, and I want to enable as many people as possible to also benefit and maximize this technology.
I think I got lucky going.
I think my first word camp was 2013 in Milwaukee.
It may have been 2014, but I think it was 2013, Milwaukee and seven years later, like my career has just gone, it’s gone up, up and above.
It’s gone, it’s gone beyond, and I want to give that to as many people as possible.
I am, I’ve when I moved to D so I helped work in Milwaukee when I was lived back in Wisconsin.
since I moved to Colorado, I think it was the first year I got here.
I started helping out the local work camp.
I like to help out with like speakers and make sure we have the right topics prepared.
then, last year there was no lead organizer.
I stepped up, I’m doing the lead organizer for two years, which is standard in the WordPress community.
so that’s where I’m at now.
And it’s exciting.
It’s kind of fun too, to grow with an organization into morphine and to shape it and to hopefully help people.
Yeah, no, I, I feel very similar to the way that you feel, which is just that word press has been such a big part of my professional journey and I’ve, I want to help people to, if they’re struggling with it or if they just want to find new ways to use it, that’s what word camp is all about.
So I really hope that everyone’s listening.
We’ll come to our humble events and get that out of it.
just a couple more questions for you.
how have you worked to make this new virtual, but style beneficial for attendees and sponsors? Like the one you’re representing?
Good question.
this has been something, so we’ve been talking internally into word camp, Denver team a lot.
Like how do we make this event beneficial for people and how also, like how to sponsors get something out of it? especially those like face to face communications that we just talked about.
I think the first thing that we’re trying to do is sponsors need to have a way to can to communicate and connect with people.
a lot of sponsors are setting up zoom rooms where you can join the zoom room and you can talk with them face to face.
if you have a problem with their hosts with their product, right, Hey, I’m having this problem.
How do I solve this? Can you help me? You can get those questions answered there.
we are also helping, if you just, if you’re just curious, you just want to go to zoom room and chat with them about the product.
We have people that are on staff that can help you there.
the last thing is, I, at least for nexus, I know we are, we’re basically having extended Q.
we have a whole bunch of awesome, speakers that we like to have give talks at various word camps.
As an example, Chris Lama is speaking at word camp Denver, he’s on a panel.
If you want to ask him some questions, but there wasn’t, there’s enough time in his session.
He’s making an appearance right after a session in the sponsor room.
get some, and you can get some one time.
That way it’s not just like a, it’s not just a Q and a, that’s a sentence at the bottom of the screen that he answers.
He gets to hear your question, to hear your voice and really understand your problem.
I think, trying to set up new ways of communicating with attendees is really important.
I just also want to say, we’re also doing some fun things.
I don’t want to spoil them, but there will be, hopefully if we can get all the I’s dotted, the T’s crossed.
We also have some fun, interactive things with local music, from Colorado local coffee shops in Colorado and, even local yoga.
So I’m really hoping they’ll come together.
They should, we got a week and a bit left before word camp, but we’re also trying to do, we’re not just trying to make it boring, right.
If we don’t want it to just be sit down with a notebook and listen to someone talking to you for 15 minutes.
We have some interesting things between before and after events.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say that it’s been really exciting too, to figure out different ways that we can highlight the local aspect of our word camping.
It’s it’s definitely been trying to just determine how we can do that in a virtual setting, but like you, I’m so excited for people to see what we came up with and I really hope that it makes an impact.
how does nexus differentiate itself compared to other hosting sponsors at these camps?
Yeah.
Good question.
I think we are, so this goes back to the boots were just talking about.
I think offering basically extended Q and a, for some of our speakers is very helpful.
also we offer a 14 day free trial.
let’s say you’re having a hard time with your website’s hosting.
It’s slow, or it’s clunky, it’s confusing, or you just want to try a host that has management commerce hosting instead of generic, WordPress hosting, what come to our sponsor room 14 day free trial account.
You can literally set it up right there with someone from our company in the room with you and experiment, right.
Hey can I install this plugin? Sure.
Go ahead.
it, look it still, and you can migrate all your settings over.
Here’s our migration plugins.
We can help you do all that.
if you have questions, go ahead and answer the questions.
We’ll we’ll answer them.
we just, we just want to be there to help you and B we want it to be as rich of a medium as possible.
we have someone in the room to help you every step of the way.
Sure.
Makes sense to me.
think just one other question, which is just, I guess I’ll mention that we are having a password protected swag bag that all attendees who’ve signed up and gotten a ticket will be emailed access information probably Thursday.
I’m guessing maybe Friday morning.
We’ll see.
what kinds of deals is nexus going to be sharing in the swag bag?
Fantastic question.
there is Apple for one year of free hosting.
if you go ahead and enter your name a year, free hosting is good for anyone, yourself, or for our clients, or for even just a hobby project.
It’s good as an experiment, do whatever you want with it.
You might as well just throw your name in the hats and maybe you get lucky and you get eight year old free hosting.
we also do have special coop.
in addition to our regular 14 day free trial, we also will have a special coupon for both managed WordPress hosting and managed WooCommerce hosting.
you’ll have to check out the swag bag to see the exact details or the swag page to see the exact details, but we offering special promotions for this event.
So make sure to check it out.
Very cool.
Well that’s all I had for you right now, Patrick, unless there’s any last thoughts you want to share on behalf of nexus or just as the lead organizer,
what I just want to share.
There’s a lot of awesome people coming, a lot of people from Colorado, but also I will say we haven’t finalized our numbers yet.
We have about another week and a bit to go.
We have already tripled our regular attendance.
there will be a lot of people showing up to this online events.
And then I just wanna encourage you.
I wanna encourage everyone to come alive.
I think every event is much better live when you can follow the chat, as opposed to, talks are always recorded and that’s, there’s value in recording talks and posting them online later for people to find it years down the line.
That’s great, but you can make it live.
It is always better with the chat and having instant communication with people.
it’s a free event, a signup, but, at the, at our, on our websites, get a ticket and show up live because I think you’ll get a lot out of it.
Plus we have so many fun surprises planned that will just be so much more sweet if you’re live.
So I second that opinion.
All right, Patrick.
Well that’s all I have for you today.
Thank you so much for joining me and sharing your insights and we’ll see everybody at word camp Denver.