WordCamp US 2023 Recap

WPVIP Government Summit

Our WordCamp week actually started the day before WCUS officially began and it started as an evening full of learning and connection. First, we had the pleasure of attending the WPVIP Government Summit at the Washington Hotel in Washington DC. This was a great opportunity to meet other government organizations using WordPress and hear from speakers discussing their experiences with digital transformation.

J.J. participated on a panel of WPVIP agency partners, including Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital, who has been collaborating with us on the NASA Flagship WordPress project. J.J. spoke on the importance of digital maturity for governments and how our CivicPress WordPress theme can help them achieve that goal. Our work evaluating different content management solutions for NASA in earlier phases of the NASA Web Modernization project and determining differentiators of WordPress and other CMS solutions was an additional talking point.

Overall, day one of WCUS was a successful and productive day for us. The panelists shared information on their accomplishments in government web development and offered insights on best practices for organizations looking to make an impact in public sector websites.

WordCamp US 2023 Keynote: For All Userkind

J.J. and Abby Bowman, NASA Web Modernization Program Lead, started off WordCamp US with their opening keynote presentation on the NASA project, which highlighted the process and progress made since 2020. They discussed how important it was to collaborate across all facets of the project and to ensure that everyone was on the same page about what needed to be done.

The mission statement for every web agency courtesy of @NASA’s Abby Bowman & @jjtoothman #WCUS pic.twitter.com/dfxUMMnEvV
— Ken Elliott | World 8-2 (@kennethspeaks) August 25, 2023

Hands on with NASA’s new digital platform #WCUS #WCUSsketchnotes pic.twitter.com/FI80Sv2wZO
— Nugget @ PMPro (@pmproplugin) August 25, 2023

The keynote also gave attendees a preview of the new website and NASA+, which was unveiled and met with cheers from the crowd.

Breakout Session

The day continued with our breakout session. We had expected only a few people to attend the session but once again, the room was packed with WordPress enthusiasts eager to learn more about how Gutenberg Blocks were used for the NASA project. Faced with this unexpected turn of events, we quickly had to pivot our plans for QA and demos and instead invited attendees to send their contact info so they could build with blocks themselves.

Watch the chaos of the breakout here:

It was truly a rewarding experience to finally be able to talk about the Web Modernization project after working on it behind closed doors for years. It was even more fulfilling to hear from others what they wanted to know more about and being able to share our knowledge and expertise with them.