WordPress On Rails
Who doesn’t enjoy going to WordCamps? They’re pretty great. Attending a WordCamp is a fantastic way to meet new people, help build community, and you get to learn something. Living in Seattle makes it easy to attend the Pacific Northwest Trifecta™ :) — Vancouver, Canada; Seattle, WA; and Portland, OR. One great aspect of attending these Pacific Northwest wordcamps is travelling by train. You can’t ask for more beautiful scenery, and you can just relax. If you’ve never travelled by train, it’s highly recommended. Amtrak has free wifi and power outlets. For longer trips, they provide sleeper cars.
Anyway, I wanted to share an idea I’ve had for a while. Currently I’m calling it WordPress on Rails. The “WordPress Whistle Stop Tour” and “Code Train” are other possible names, but WordPress on Rails is by far my favorite because, you know, nerd humor :) Imagine a 2 or 3 week tour of WordCamps where we, as a group, travel between the wordcamps by train! While we’re travelling, we’re designing and developing a project. It takes about 4 days to travel across the width of the US by train. Naturally, it depends on the cities in question. Since WordCamps happen on the weekend, we fill the time between with travel. So we strategically select wordcamps on opposite sides of the country. Let’s pretend the following cities are scheduled consecutively, and it starts with WordCamp Seattle. A possible schedule might look like:
- WordCamp Seattle (Sat + Sun)
- Travel to New York City (Leave Monday morning and Arrive Thursday evening)
- spend friday exploring NYC
- WordCamp New York City (Sat + Sun)
- Travel to San Francisco (Leave Monday morning and Arrive Thursday evening)
- spend friday exploring SF
- WordCamp San Franciso (Sat + Sun)
- fly back to your home city
There are some challenges with making this happen. It’s hard enough for wordcamp organizers to plan and run their own event, but to get certain cities to schedule their events so they occur on sequential weeks adds a new, severe constraint. Also, it’s likely not every participant will do the entire trip. So organizing sleeper cars and payments for people leaving and entering the train at various times, increases the difficulty in planning. Also, we’ll probably need to get sponsors. I imagine we’ll need to pre-pay amtrak for our group tickets and sleeper cars. How do we keep it affordable? Also what will people do for lodging while attending the wordcamps when they’re not on the train – AirBNB, hotel? Is that included in the price?
The tech side of things is the easy part. We’d get a mac mini to host our server software, documentation, and authoritative repos and sync them with GitHub when wifi allows. The train has power outlets and wifi. There’s also the Dash app that provides access to a wealth of documention for open source projects. We’d be pretty self sufficient, but still have internet access.
So, what do you think? pretty interesting, right?! Would you be interested? Do you have any ideas for solutions? I’d love to hear them.
I think this is a fantastic idea! Love it. I would definitely take a week and do WordPress on Rails. The caveat here is the week or two. It would be great to be able to take off work and but I do not think that is possible for me personally. If it was setup more like #BeachPress where it was coworking together with maybe some group activities in the evening that would fit more with my time.
What do you think about the coworking idea?
That’s something I hadn’t thought of yet. Depending on how many people are in our group, there could be multiple activities. There could be people getting on at various points. The coworking idea has merit, cuz people still have jobs to do. Although I do think it’d be awesome to have us build something together and potentially present it at the last wordcamp of the trip – whatever city that may be :)
Rather than flying out to start in one location, potentially one could just hop on and join the train as it passes by in their city. That would make me more willing to do it.
that occurred to me as well. It’ll make the logistics planning more difficult – but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
This is basically the best idea I’ve ever heard. That is all.
This makes me happy!