WordCamp New Zealand. Done.

Its been a week since I picked up Matt Mullenweg for his interview with Kim Hill and I’m still on a good WordCamp induced high – although it could be that the fantastic free coffee provided by Coffee Supreme all weekend is finally wearing off.

On the weekend 8th and 9th of August at the Mt Victoria Bowling Club in WGTN, New Zealand we ran the first WordCamp in Aotearoa. It was a huge success with over 120 people attending. We had a great range of sponsors, many helpers and volunteers who helped with various jobs over the weekend making it a success.

One of the partticulalry great things about WordCamp NZ for us was that it brought WordPress Developers, bloggers and Web developers all together under the one roof for two whole days. Plenty of networking went down and we all learnt a great deal.

For the organizers (Dan Milward, Jason Kemp and Anthony Cole) it all started months ago back at the Sydney WordCamp. Since then we have been arranging sponsors, looking at venues, trying to organize speakers and so forth. And it all came together last weekend.

I’d just like to quickly thank the following people and businesses that helped us throughout the weekend!!

• Coffee Supreme
• Magnum Mac
• Xero
• Concept to Reality (amazing sound and visuals)
• NZ Wireless
• Idealog Magazine
• MyHost
• EziWeb
• Brett Taylor (on live Tweeting and keeping the world up to date)

And the highlights, aside from the Safari suit the obvoius highlights for me were:

• The weather and the Venue. I’m so glad we went for the Mt Vic bowling club as opposed to a corporate venue or a hotel venue. We had an amazing outlook and
• Matt Mullenweg our Key Note speaker for sharing his heart out and running a very interesting and informative Q & A session on all topics WordPress
• Catching up with Sam Baeurs, Alex Shiels, Gareth Townsend, Jason Conroy and Jeff Waugh from Australia (all Sheep jokes aside these guys were great value)