Last Friday I was honoured to be invited to speak about the Business of Open Source at the WordPress Bucharest meetup.
The slides I presented with are below, my first deck in Automattic colours. Unfortunately the recording of the presentation didn’t work out, so you’ll have to imagine the spiel to go along with it.
The three principles I outline in the presentation, An Outward Facing Team, Freely Shared Code, and Community Engagement, are principles that worked for us in Code For The People, and allowed us the impact we wanted to have on WordPress and on our clients’ projects… but they do sound scary. Giving away the things which traditional business holds dear is tough, and it’s tougher to persuade clients to go along with this approach. For us the approach paid dividends, and it’s also working for many other businesses across the world… not least my current employer, Automattic.
This was the first remote presentation I’ve given, we used Google Hangouts, and the experience was pretty smooth on the whole, though it was unnerving not to be able to see the whites of the eyes of my audience (because I had my slide deck running full screen). That said, it’s amazing to be able to present to one city from a different country and I’d definitely do it again if asked.
Thanks to Marius Vetrici for inviting me, Bogdan Dragomir for helping me get setup technically, and the Bucharest WordPress Meetup for listening and for their questions.
Hi Simon,
I uploaded your exclude page from navigation plugin to WP, but sorry to say I can not see the check-box, and really wanted to ask for some help – could not find a possibility for this anywhere.
can you help? Yes you’ve guessed – i’m still fairly new to this but eager to learn…. thanks
then i could not i find a way to contact you – it was not a comment i wanted to leave. Might be an idea to provide the old fashioned way for people to contact you who are not on twitter – that was the only means of communication with you i could see.