I was proud to present at the 11/12/2014 WordPress Meetup.
The topic - WordPress Workflows.

Originally I planned to be one of several “lightning round” presenters, presenting for 10-15 minutes on a subject. There were no other volunteers to speak, so I was asked to speak the entire hour.

When giving presentations, I always want to have an interesting message or provide information of value. I had only been to this meetup once before, so I was not sure of the audience. I made some assumptions of what might be a good topic, based on what I would find of interest.

A Surprise Guest I purposely added slides at the beginning of my presentation to promote the other meetups I’m involved with (Clean Coders, GemCityJS, Dayton Web Developers and GiveCamp).
When I mentioned how GiveCamp is a great resource to plug-into because it’s heavy with WordPress needs, Rachel Barnett (who was sitting on my far left) spoke up and said she can testify to the value of GiveCamp. She came in late so I didn’t see her come in.

Rachel Barnett is from the Dayton Ombudsman Association - the non-profit project that I was on during GiveCamp 2014. Rachel hung out with our project team at GiveCamp as we worked on their WordPress/database project.

During GiveCamp I suggested she come to the WordPress MeetUp to learn more about WordPress. I was pleasantly surprised to see her there and glad she took my advice.

After my presentation we all turned our attention to Rachel’s WordPress needs. We created an impromptu workshop to address some of her problems in WordPress.

Nathan Driver (the meeting coordinator) suggested the next meeting be another workshop for Rachel’s WordPress website.

There’s something magical about being the pivot point where connections are made, that might not have happened if you were weren’t there.