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Dumaguete WordPress Meetup

Discussion in 'Dumaguete City' started by ajayver, Jun 10, 2014.

  1. ajayver

    ajayver DI Member Showcase Reviewer

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    Hi!

    Yesterday Matt Mullenweg visited Manila (WordPress Community Meetup With Matt | WordPress Meetup) and gave his speech. The event was fully booked long before the date, so there are people who are interested in WP but there is no active community in Philippines. Me and the founder of Gambit technologies created a facebook group for WordPress developers in Philippines: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wpdevph/

    Please join and invite other developers if you know any, we are planning to have local monthly Dumaguete meetups for sharing the experience, discussing news, meet new people. If we find enough developers here, we have a good chance of hosting WordCamp Philippines 2015 here!
     
  2. TheDude

    TheDude DI Forum Patron Highly Rated Poster

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    Hm, okay, interesting. If I were to say I would show up, the rest of the guys here would laugh at me because I'm never able to show up for anything. But, I'll give it a try.

    I'm not sure I would bother though, to be honest. There is little interest here in the web. Look around, businesses here just don't care about it.

    Most interesting in the Philippines is SMS as an application (and anything you can do with a feature phone) and e-commerce on platforms (Facebook for example) much like you see in China (except China doesn't use Facebook.) Apps will become big when smart phone adoptions cranks up another notch or two, but you don't use apps for small business e-commerce unless it's on a big platform like my previous example.

    Basically, look at China and that's where the Philippines is going. I doubt Wordpress is big in China either. I could be wrong though.
     
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    ajayver

    ajayver DI Member Showcase Reviewer

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    Hi!

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

    I agree that WP and web in general is not popular here, but most of my projects are focused on European and US market - same for other developers that I know in Manila - mostly all of us work on themeforest/codecanyon which are geographically independent markets.

    I believe there are some freelancers in Dumaguete who specialize on WP. Would be nice to find them even if there are only 2-3 of them :smile: Every community needs a start and if there is no community - we can build it. I wish I could start some free courses in Dumaguete for those who wants to learn WP, but I need someone to share the ideas with first.
     
  4. TheDude

    TheDude DI Forum Patron Highly Rated Poster

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    Right, so I suppose it's good for a professional meetup.

    Go ahead and ping me with times and locations.

    Maybe it would be better to broaden it into any sort of web professional rather than Wordpress. In fact, if it's only people who are doing work for clients abroad, then it might be good to make it more of a freelancer's meetup.

    Personally, if I were to try teaching and adding, I would rather do it for things like those I mentioned. Areas people locally will actually care about now and in the near future. But starting with a Wordpress meetup is good. Go for it.
     
  5. The Dane

    The Dane DI Senior Member

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    If you make it a freelancer's meetup half the broads from the disco will show up...

    That might be good... or bad depending what you are trying to achieve :-)
     
  6. TheDude

    TheDude DI Forum Patron Highly Rated Poster

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    Haha, couldn't turn out well. We could have a riot on our hands.

    "All these girls show up, only two customers, they have no money, only want to talk about Wordpress."

    We could make "good service" the theme of the meeting but I doubt any of them would learn anything.

    I could go on for days with jokes about this.
     
  7. TheDude

    TheDude DI Forum Patron Highly Rated Poster

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    @ajayver I joined your Wordpress group (waiting for admin.) Even if just you and I met up, it might be interesting. I actually do most of my development on a different platform, but I do take on WP gigs at times.

    Otherwise, I have been a member of this forum for a long time and I don't think we are going to get anymore love from here.

    There was a .NET guy here from Ireland who ran an office with locals working for him on a startup and some client work for cashflow. He has since moved on to Cebu (I think.) One of this developers also went to Cebu and then ended up moving to Australia. Good for him for sticking with it and turning the skill into what appears to be a good life.

    There are a couple of Ruby guys here. One guy lives in Dauin and I'm not sure he is still active in dev. The other guy is the founder of Gemfury, which is a quite successful service and keeps him pretty busy.

    I have a buddy who is a Wordpress developer in Sydney possibly moving here anywhere between 6 - 24 months.

    The founder (U.S. money and idea guy) and co-founder (British PHP guy) behind mymobilepatron.com (a sort of multi level marketing program for building client web sites) are here. They have an office in Foundation I think.

    A couple of years ago I met a guy from the U.S. who was standing in as a H.S. soccer coach at Foundation. I think he might have been behind the push to give Ipads to all the the H.S. students. At that time he had been doing some mobile stuff with Foundation college students. This is the sort of thing that's interesting to me, so I would love to track this guy down and see what he is up to today.

    So, there are a small number of people here and there spread through different things. The area does attract some people coming through and interested in web / mobile tech. There aren't a lot. There are probably a lot of locals doing interesting things I don't know about, but you would have to find them on Facebook or something like that.
     
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    ajayver

    ajayver DI Member Showcase Reviewer

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    Yeah, I guess it would be much more appropriate to meet web involved people instead of limiting this to wordpress only.

    I know one ruby on rails developer from Dauin: https://github.com/gavinhughes but I'm not sure if he is still here, I will email him as soon as we will have a date and venue. He was very interested in building some kind of developer's community here. I think he even tried to teach ruby in Silliman University.

    I think we can wait for a week or two so other interested people can see this post or facebook group and then we can arrange the first small meeting.
     
  9. TheDude

    TheDude DI Forum Patron Highly Rated Poster

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    Yep, it's Gavin. I have never met him. Don't know where he is at these days. Getting foreigners to meet at a time and place here is like herding cats. They travel a lot and may spend long stretches in their home countries. It seems every time I try to meet up with a developer here, they are somewhere other than Dumaguete. They live here, they just aren't ever here. :wink:

    What would you need in a venue? Actually, I don't even know what goes on at these meetups, I have never been to one. The closest I have ever been was a Linux User Group back home and all they did was bullshit and eat pizza.
     
  10. Lostgrigo

    Lostgrigo DI Junior Member

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    A few years back I started a group in Dumaguete called the Dumaguete Computer Club. It was great fun getting together with like-minded people, but I had to end it as I needed to go back to Canada for awhile. I would love to join this new group.

    I have numerous Wordpress websites I need to upgrade and develop. I enjoy affiliate marketing and Adsense. And, I enjoy doing SEO. I would love to start a Joint Venture with someone here in Dumaguete.

    I am not a programmer or am I an expert at anything. I dabble!
     
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