🍁 Calling for Sponsors - WordCamp Canada 2026

Early-bird sponsorships are open until March 31.

Join one of the world’s largest open-source communities and connect with the people building the future of WordPress.

Secure your sponsorship:
https://canada.wordcamp.org/2026/becoming-a-sponsor/

#WCEH26 #WCEH

I watched a #webinar today where the speaker was all performance. BIG ENERGY. BIGGER ACT. It felt forced. Cringey. My body tensed. Ever had that happen?

We don’t have to become a different person on stage, even in #tech. If loud is you, amazing. Be loud. If it’s not, stop trying to be something you’re not.

Things I teach my tech public speaking clients:

1. Quiet authenticity is loud. I held a room softly for 45 minutes at #WCEH. It works. (Link in the P.S.)

My #WCEH keynote is up! I'm so excited to share it with you.

In this speech, I talk about the 10 lessons I learned as a polite Canadian working with 50 countries.

https://wordpress.tv/2025/11/18/from-canada-to-the-world-10-lessons-from-working-with-50-countries/

The sound is rough, but captions are available in the settings in the bottom right corner.

#WordCampCanada #WCCanada2025 #wceh2025 #PublicSpeaking #DiversityAndInclusion #DEI #DEIB #DiversityInTech

The videos from last month's WordCamp Canada 2025 have been posted on WordPress.tv:

https://wordpress.tv/event/wordcamp-canada-2025/

#wordpress #WCEH

Feeling teary-eyed reading this about my #keynote:

* "Jill's talk ... knocked the week out of the park, honestly.”

* “Such a vulnerable and insightful talk about working across cultures, told through stories of mistakes she had made.”

* “Phenomenal and inspirational stuff!”

Lois's reflections on the whole camp are such an insightful read:

I’m excited that more people will be able to hear the keynote soon when the recording is released! 💙

#WCCanada2025 #wceh2025 #wceh #WordCampCanada

In response to Matt Mullenweg’s “WordCamp Canada Talk”

https://jeffpaul.com/2025/11/reblog-matt-mullenweg-wordcamp-canada-talk/

Great writeup about WCEH from @peterhebert. I enjoyed reading your thoughts and takeaways from my #keynote. :)

“Jill shared stories and lessons about how she scaled a local workshop in Vancouver to 50 countries. Her talk reminded me to always check myself and my unconscious assumptions when interacting in a group setting."

https://peterhebert.com/en/article/2025/wordcamp-canada-2025-recap

#WordCampCanada #wceh2025 #wceh #keynote

WordCamp Canada 2025

This past week was the 2nd edition of WordCamp Canada (affectionately known by the hashtag #WCEH on “the socials”).

Organizing

It was my honour last year to be part of the organizing committee for WordCamp Canada. We had a great team led by Shanta Nathwani, Matthew Graham and myself.

Even with a great team, organizing an event like this is a huge amount of work. So this year I decided to step back from organizing, and instead volunteered.

The 2025 organizing committee led by James Giroux did a fantastic job putting together this year’s camp. My personal thank you to Miriam Goldman, this year’s volunteer coordinator, for making that experience a great one!

The Venue

This year’s WordCamp was held in Richcraft Hall at Carleton University in Ottawa. Although this was WordCamp Canada’s first time here, WordCamp Ottawa has used this venue several times for the local camp.

Not only is it a beautiful building (the patio overlooking the river is particularly stunning), but Carleton University itself uses WordPress for hundreds of sites that make up the carleton.ca web presence.

Contributor Day

WordCamp Canada hosted a Contributor Day. This is an event dedicated contributing back to the WordPress open source project. This could be working on the core product, documentation, accessibility, translations, or many other teams.

I chose to work on the WP-CLI command line project, adding the ability to delete all comments from a site with an --all flag on the wp comment delete command. As of the time of writing this post, the pull request for this feature is almost ready to be merged.

I’m hoping someone will put together a list of all the contributors that were worked on during WordCamp Canada.

The Content

Like most WordCamps, I don’t spend a huge amount of time in the talks themselves. I prefer to network in the “Hallway Track”, or volunteer where needed.

I was able to catch parts of several talks over the two days of the camps.

The team put together a lineup of talks across a wide range of topics.

To nobody’s surprise, AI was a hot topic of discussion this year, but the camp covered:

• Accessibility
• AI
• Business
• DevOps
• Development (Blocks, etc.)
• Documentation
• Federation
• SEO

as well as three keynote talks, and a town hall with one of the co-founders of WordPress.

My Takeaways

The WordPress Community in Canada is still going strong. The attendees this year were mostly first timers, with a solid group of returning attendees.

Sound like Fun?

It’s likely that the next WordCamp Canada will happen somewhere else in the country. Like WordCamp US, we’d planned to have the camp in the same city two years in a row. I’m thinking… west coast?

If you’re interested in helping out, reach out on the WordCamp Canada site, or on WordPress Canada’s Slack. They’ll be looking for organizers from around the country to help put 2026 together!

#WCEH