OpenCamp Dallas 2010 Recap

As most of you probably know, I was in Dallas this past weekend for OpenCamp 2010, the successor to Wordcamp Dallas 2008 and 2009. The idea behind the conference was to open WordCamp to other blogging platforms, namely Drupal, Joomla and .net, and bring everyone together as bloggers rather than users of a specific CMS.

I also gave a talk at the event, a 30-minute session as part of the WordPress track on how to share your work on the Web without hurting your copyright. The focus of the talk was how to let legitimate users use your content without letting plagiarists, spammers and others just run away with it.

During the talk, I highlighted Creative Commons licensing as well as three services that are making traditional blog content, including text and images, easier to share with attribution. They included Embed Anything (previous coverage), Clp.ly (previous coverage) and Tynt (previous coverage).

All in all, everything went very well. The conference started an hour late due to some technical difficulties but ran smoothly after that. None of the tracks seemed to fall behind and the organizers did a great job moving the entire event along. My talk seemed to be well-received with lots of good questions both in the session and afterward.

The best part, however, was meeting up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in over a year and hanging out a bit. Late night dinners with Aaron Brazell, Ronald Huereca, Doug Vann and Mike Potter were great. Also seeing old buddies like Lorelle VanFossen, Dave Moyer, Kat Rice, Rob Holmes and Jeff Guin (who was nice enough to put up with us for the last 4.5 hours of the drive up there) among countless others was wonderful.

All in all, it was a great conference and a great time. I met a lot of new people got back together with some old friends and stayed out way past my bed time the entire trip (running on about 10 hours of sleep across the three nights).

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers and volunteers of this event including John P, Cali Lewis, Matthew McGarity, Mark Ramsey and Jennifer Conley to name just a few. Their hard work really showed off.

Also, as an open invitation to the people I met, please feel free to add me on Facebook and stay in touch.

I’ve embedded my slides from my presentation below and hope to have the video from the talk up soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please let me know!

Thank you again to everyone for making the conference so great and I’m already looking forward to next year.

Photos

If you are interested in photos from the conference, I’ve created a gallery on Facebook for my images that is public for all. Please forgive the poor photo quality as they were taken in tough lighting with an old iPhone (that needs a proper burial). Crystal had the good camera and was being artistic with it.

Presentation Slides