Announcing the First Round of Speakers

We’re happy to announce our first round of speakers (with more coming soon). Give a warm Texas welcome to these awesome folks.

Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan McKeown is a Word Ninja at Audrey Capital where she writes about WordPress, deals with documentation, and has nightmares about the Codex. She’s currently working on an open source book about the history of WordPress. She spends her days delving into the brains of its early developers and community members. When she’s not worrying about the finer details of forking and the GPL, she’s helping out with the project’s future by wrangling WordPress’ documentation. In her spare time, she writes and edits for Smashing Magazine, eats, reads, and travels under the sea looking for manta rays.

Bill Erickson

A WordPress consultant with 7 years of experience and hundreds of satisfied clients. He’s also a contributing developer to the Genesis theme framework, and has written 19 plugins which have been downloaded over 200,000 times.

Ilene Haddad

Ilene Haddad is a graphic designer, business owner and Grand Poobah of BlogathonATX. Her work with Austin’s blogging community earned her the Creative Initiative Award from the Women Communicators of Austin and a Statesman Social Media Award. In her spare time, she hosts a co-working group for local entrepreneurs and draws comics at CasaWeenie.com. She lives in Austin with two lapdogs, one husband and about a dozen Apple products. Buy her a decaf espresso, and she’ll reveal all her secrets.* *Disclaimer: Ilene doesn’t really have any secrets, but she’ll happily make some up in exchange for coffee.

Zack Tollman

Residing in Portland, Oregon, Zack longs for the cold, snowy days of his Alaskan youth. He enjoys strumming his guitar, playing hockey, and spending time with his fiancée and dog. Otherwise, you’ll find him at his computer meticulously spinning lines of clean WordPress code.

Elise C. Alley

Elise is the Lead Support Tech for iThemes Exchange. She has been working with iThemes for two years, first in general plugin support, then leading Exchange support since its release, as well as support for each of the Exchange add-ons. When not working with Exchange, Elise can be found chasing her nephews, reading or watching zombie movies/shows to prepare for the upcoming apocalypse.

Ronnie Burt

A native Austinite, Ronnie Burt helps lead the team behind CampusPress – hosting hundreds of large WordPress Multisite networks for schools and universities, including the Edublogs network with well over 2 million blogs. He volunteers on the side helping to build and maintain WordPress sites for a few education groups and a local community orchestra, that he also performs with.