November WordPress Meetup

For our November meetup, we'll be doing our standard two-speaker set with time for networking before, between, and after.

Speakers have not completely been finalized yet. Be sure to check back here and on Twitter (@WordPressDC (https://twitter.com/wordpressdc)) for more information as they are announced.

Up to my Eyeballs in Technical Debt!

Steve Grunwell (https://stevegrunwell.com/) (@stevegrunwell (https://twitter.com/stevegrunwell))

Every decision we make in our projects has the potential to increase or reduce technical debt. While the only way to completely eliminate the debt is to never write any code, there are steps that we as engineers, project managers, and project stakeholders can take to mitigate our risk. This talk covers the concept of technical debt, its potential to devastate projects, and red flags that project teams can look for to reduce its impact before it spirals out of control.

Steve is a lead web engineer at 10up (https://10up.com).

Getting Knowledge out of the Inbox: WordPress as a Knowledge Management Tool

David Zweigel

The U.S. Department of State is different than most Federal Agencies. It has over 270 missions and offices around the world with 25% of its career staff moving every 2-4 years. To make things more difficult, too often knowledge is locked in emails, which number 3 million each day.

The Department is looking to new ways of harnessing information with modern Knowledge Management principles. There are many options on the market, but are often targeted at the private sector and too costly. However, one effort is looking at leverage open source tools, such as WordPress, to help our Foreign Diplomatic Policy practitioners make more informed and timely decisions.

David Zweigel will discuss and show how the Office of eDiplomacy is creating an innovate tool from WordPress, the Mission Portfolio. A product that will harnesses WordPress, BuddyPress, and other open source and low-cost commercial elements to create a powerful warehouse of knowledge and collaboration.

David is an Innovation Leader at the U.S. Department of State.

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As always, food and drink will be sponsored by CHIEF (http://agencychief.com/).

We rely on accurate RSVP counts to estimate how much food and drink to purchase for the event. If you realize you can't make it, please update your RSVP as soon as possible.

Also, the end time for last month's meetup was mistakenly set at 9:30 PM, and it came to our attention that meetup goers were showing up past 9 wondering where everyone was. Our meetup group actually needs to be completely vacated from this venue by 9. We will set the end time a little earlier than that from now on to avoid future confusion.

And the final pre-meetup announcement: you can still purchase tickets for nearby WordCamp Baltimore (https://2016.baltimore.wordcamp.org/tickets/)! Less than 50 general admission tickets remain, so be sure to secure your ticket soon if you're planning on attending. It will take place on November 19-20, the weekend right after our November meetup.