Category: Speakers

1. A lightning talks is brief (5 minutes) which requires the speaker to make his or her point clearly and rid the presentation of non-critical information. This causes the audience to be more attentive to the speaker and gain a broader array of knowledge from the presentations given. It’s like Youtube vs full length movies! (src)
2. Lightning talks originated and evolved in the tech world. They are also known as Data Blitz, at times! Makes sense you should so one at WordCamp.
3. Delivery is considered more important than content of a lightning talk. (src)
4. It is a well known antidote to Death by PowerPoint.
5. At many conferences, lightning talks are the second most popular presentation type, after the keynote presentation. (src is also a great article)
6. It’s a great format to showcase your website, blog, plugin or theme that you curate with love and form meaningful connections with interested readers and users.
7. It’s a great way to start for first time speakers because it doesn’t require a lot of formal preparation except practice, practice and practice!
8. It is especially great for first time speakers of WordCamp Pune because yyou don’t have to think of a “topic”.
9. Similar short and fun formats are Ignite talks and Pecha Kucha. So, you could create crossovers that could be more fun! For eg, you could talk about 20 best posts from your blog in 5 minutes. Maybe next WordCamp! (src)
10. Speaker applications are now closed so this is the only way to get a slot officially!

If you are convinced, why not apply now, bloggers and developers?

Those who have already applied, please have a little more patience, we’ll get to your applications very very soon! 🙂

Creating good quality, useful and interesting podcasts is very difficult. That’s why we have an expert in the house. Shrikant Joshi is someone who broadcasts a radio show daily, has blogged for a long time and even developed WordPress themes. Who better to help us podcast better (or even start, if you haven’t done so yet) with a workshop on Podcasting with WordPress.

After a long day at work, college or school, when Pune heads home, the one person who ALWAYS accompanies them, without fail is apna “Pune ka Raja” Shrikant. Born with a sense of punny, tongue-in-cheek humor, Shrikant is a lovable know-it-all about anything and everything weird happening in Pune and across the world. He loves technology and is constantly trying to learn all things new.

His show, MH935, is a light-hearted and fun-filled journey between 5 pm and 9 pm on weekdays. Shrikant fills the show with lots of information and entertainment while you return from a long day at college, work or ahem anywhere else! Armed with smart one-liners and funny parodies rap-ishtyle on the topics-du-jour Shrikant lives life by the mantra: Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.

PS: You can find him in the Limca Book of Records, too! 😉 😉

We had never heard of Jitesh before his application turned up in our inbox. At the first Wordex Conference, he was a revelation and we’re proud to host his talk on How to Design Useful Websites in a mix of Marathi and English.

Jitesh is a mobile and web programmer from Solapur. He has been using WordPress for the last 2 years. Apart from building small business websites using WordPress, he regularly conducts theme development workshops for beginners.

When he doesn’t build with WordPress, he shifts his attention to building Android apps and is quite good at it. In fact, he was the winner of the Samsung Appsolute Challenge in 2012.

Jitesh doesn’t just write and teach code. He loves to read, loves to eat and sometimes likes to cook. He’s also an active Rotarian and enjoys organising youth programs.

He lives in the quaint city of Solapur with his parents, wife Vaishali and daughter Tanisha.

Shilpa works with a whole repertoire of WordPress plugins and themes at her organisation and hence we feel she is the best person to help you with the best ways to Promote your WordPress Plugin or Theme. That’s exactly what our second woman speaker is going to do at WordCamp Pune 2015!

She joined the WordPress party a little late but has been completely enamoured by the WordPress community sincethen. She co-founded Hummingbird Web Solutions in 2011 which nurtures a number of popular WordPress products ( SlideDeck, CyberChimps , WPeka Club, WPAuctionSoftware and SurveyFunnel).

She was bitten by the travel bug pretty early on and was lucky enough to have a job (in her earlier corporate avatar) that took her to various countries, meeting some truly wonderful people everywhere!

She enjoys dancing in the rain, trekking, camping in the wild. She has also been learning to play the guitar for 5 years now — hopes to play an entire song properly some day. Soon.

Priyanka is a first time WordCamp speaker. She is also our first (but not the last) woman speaker. Her session would be primarily in Hindi with a little Hinglish thrown in for good measure. She’d be speaking on the WordPress JSON API

Priyanka is a web developer with a special interest in WordPress. She has been using WordPress for developing websites for clients for about 2 years now and loves to explore the possibilities of WordPress.

She likes to extend features of existing plugins to match her clients’ needs. She’s developed her plugin and theme development skills this way. The WP_Query class is her favorite of everything that is WordPress. She’s looking to develop a plugin for easier Contact and Enquiry management in the near future.

Prior to exploring her coding chops, Priyanka was a teacher and still loves to train new hires in her team. She loves interacting with beginners and regularly conducts training sessions at CityIT, her organisation.

Everybody knows Topher in Pune, thanks to the HeroPress project and a very popular campaign to fund his trip to this WordCamp. A lot of known members of the local and global communities, including Matt Mullenweg saw the value of his coming here and funded him so he could talk to us about HeroPress: Stories of Success.

His full name is Christopher DeRosia; Topher comes from the second half of Christopher. He started building web sites with plain html on a VAX VMS system in 1994 but switched to PHP/FI when it came out. He was using plain PHP/MySQL until 2010 when WordPress 3.0 came out with Custom Post Types. Since then, he hasn’t really built with anything else. He’s been a freelancer, the CTO of a Startup, a super hero with X-Team, and now documents Easy Digital Downloads.

He’s married, has 2 teen daughters and two cute little dogs. He lives in the small city of Grand Rapids MI, where it rarely gets above 30C, but occasionally gets below -30C. It’s a very snowy world in the winter.

Here’s an old but interesting list of 25 random things about him.

We really feel blessed to have received great response to both our call for Volunteers and Volunteer Photographers. Thank you to all of those who applied. This community loves you and loves your intent.

Thanks to your overwhelming response, we’re now closing the call for Volunteer Photographers, as well. We’ve already closed the call for volunteers. We’ll be introducing everyone to the short-listed volunteers, asap.

We are now looking for are speakers to provide content and we are doing that for just two more days. Apply before it’s too late!

We’re also looking for bloggers to showcase their blogs and developers to showcase their products in lightning talks.