Building Collaborative Connectivity with the WordPress Community

They say a WordCamp isn’t really over until you’ve blogged about it, and we can attest to that. The momentum our team was able to build in San Diego this year was immense, and it’s hard to believe so much time has passed already. Many of the interactions that started in the expo hall or the hallway track and other networking events are the fuel of projects and opportunities we continue to explore in Q4.

For our inaugural booth, the team at Multicollab wanted to maximize engagement experiences and revel in the excitement of the reuniting of the WordPress community. We opted to live demo our tool by taking turns blogging from the booth and capturing the gameplay at our #Connect4WCUS Connect4 tabletop experience. If you were in San Diego, now is your chance to relive some of that fun. If you missed this year, we hope these live highlights give a nice glimpse into the overall energy and diversity of participants at this year’s WordCamp US.

Day 1 (Written live at the event)

The excitement of getting into the venue today (assuming you didn’t have challenges with your VOW Digital Health access) has been really great. People are healthy and happy to be here – and you can see the smiles showing behind the masks.

At the Multicollab booth we set up a #Connect4WCUS game to help us break the ice and get back in front of the WordPress community. Our friend Michelle Keefer challenged a new friend she met while waiting in line to meet Paul – the IT guy that was saving the folks from the aforementioned challenges with access.

MK starts off on a winning streak – so our new friend began bringing her teammates over to try and break it. After 5 games won, MK was finally brought down by one of the teammates on the PMC editorial team.

Shortly after, we had an Automattician come visit the booth to play and extended the losing streak.

We have just found out that we aren’t the only Connect4 game in the sponsorship hall – in fact, we learned (thanks to this friendly Automattician) that this other booth playing Connect4 is part of another, wider game moderated by the GoDaddy booth. We’ll need to find a stamp so we can help play along with others at the “wrong” Connect4 setup!

Jeremy got his first game in and took his first loss.

So far players have been excited to play as well as learn about the plugin. We’ve met a content creator managing a large team that was thrilled about saving 42% of her team’s time without having to re-format content in Gutenburg after collaborating in Google Docs. We have also met a couple of agencies that were interested in learning about a co-selling program.

Michelle is stepping up to the plate for a game to see if she can redeem herself after 2 losses. Myles (from XWP) said his 8-year-old always beats him so he shouldn’t be the strongest competition, but he swung for a home run and came out victorious! Way to go Myles.

During lunch hours, Anil covered the booth and had a great time. His training before WordCamp to learn how to play Connect4 has paid off! Always do your research, folks!

After much anticipation, MK and Carole met for a best of 2 out of 3 games.

It was a long game and almost ended in a stalemate – but in the end, Michelle’s losing streak has continued. Luckily she had some illegal candy to cheer her up. Her losing streak is so bad – she even lost to her Ukrainian acquaintance Alex, that had never even heard of this game prior to playing long at the Multicollab booth.

Alex wasn’t the only person to learn to play Connect4 today for the first time – the beauty of this global community has the opportunity to teach one another about the childhood games we played and see the smile lines move behind the masks.

Battles or collaboration…. at the Multicollab booth we are more about love and collaboration, but things can indeed heat up when in the midst of a crazy game of connect four that bring back reminisce of youth. Watching the pure joy come from classic games that will stand the test of time brings us joy. Jeremy has recently started to get into playing Super Pac-Man locally at home with a goal that I’m currently obsessed with of breaking 100,000 as my high score goal. What classic games do you love? Leave your comment below and let’s collab!

DAY 2 – BEGINS

On a note that everybody is a winner. Michelle vs the first contestant of the day is both playing from two sides of the table all while playing with the same color. Haha. That game is going to be a quick one. Looks like there might have been a few too many glasses of wine last night. It’s slow and quiet this morning in the expo hall – seems like she wasn’t the only one.

We’ve been taking advantage of the quiet to tinker around with our Multicollab tool – and talking to friends at Green Geeks about their experience using the plugin. We love hearing these insights so we can bring them back to our team to continuously improve the product. It has been built based on the needs of a handful of clients and collaborators at Automattic – but there is nothing better than real-world use cases.

The games continue. We made some new friends from Digital Cube from Philly, the makers of Shifter, and faced off for a quick game where Jason beat Daniel with a bottom-row red streak. We hung out for a bit talking about collaborative editing and the product space.

Jeremy and Michelle decided it was time to play against one another, and found themselves in a speed round of Connect 4. The best two out of three winners went to Michelle.

We met someone living in Vegas that doesn’t own a set of playing cards, so we had to remedy that. One of the perks of getting towards the end of the conference is swag flows more freely – not having to win the prize – because nobody here wants to pack their swag home.

Friends Jessica and Lina going best two out of three – first-time WordCampers having a great time. They are new to WordPress and are enjoying learning about what is possible to do with WordPress. Lina pulled her piece out after a mistaken drop – the competition is fierce!

The caricatures next door have gotten quite popular, and we’ve been pleased to chat with several folks waiting in line to be created as a Wapuu. When the line was a bit longer, Julius from North Carolina played Michelle, battling best 3 out of 5. With a tie of 2 and 2, we paused so he can be Wapuud too as soon as Carole was finished with hers.

The expo hall is buzzing at the end of the day, as GoDaddy and others begin calling for the raffle winners and sessions break for the last break of the day.

It seems like WordCamp ended as quickly as it began. There was so much energy and excitement throughout the weekend. We’ve heard from quite a few friends that the recovery period wasn’t too bad, and we didn’t hear of any COVID diagnosis despite our gathering. Thanks again to the organizers, they did a great job!

Can’t wait to connect again at a future WordCamp!