Stanislav Khromov

This year WordCamp Stockholm is part of Internetdagarna – the largest IT conference in Sweden. We sat down with Niklas Serén, project manager at Internetdagarna to talk about their conference and WordPress.

Hello Niklas! Tell us a little bit about Internetdagarna and IIS!
IIS is a nonprofit organization that, besides managing the top level domain .SE (and .nu), invests in the development of the internet.

Actually, our main goal is to contribute to the “positive development of a free and open internet for all”. Internetdagarna is one way to serve the internet community with knowledge sharing, network and fun!

Why did Internetdagarna decide to host WordCamp Stockholm?
Mainly because WordPress contributes to the above, but also because the community is strong and have a great will to learn. Last year we had a full day of Drupal and we have hosted WordPress-tracks in the past.

How do you feel about WordPress as a CMS?
We use WordPress on all our sites and we have a predisposition for open source applications. For, instance our school competition “Webbstjärnan” revolves around pupils making sites in WP.

WordPress is a great CMS – and helps lowering the threshold for new people to make great content online – without taking away the opportunity for professional implementations. Just as it should be.

Internetdagarna.se – proudly running on WordPress

How do you see Internetdagarna evolving in the future?
We have been sold out for the last two years so we are quite confident we are giving the community a great service. But we always look at improvements and have no fear of reinventing ourselves.
Maybe we want to add an extra day of un-conference, workshops or hackathons…. We will see…

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us!

Thank you!

Don’t forget to join us on the official WordCamp Contribution day on November 23. See the schedule for more information.

One of our Admin sponsors is Angry Creative. We’ve interviewed their CEO Jimmy Rosén about why they are choosing to support our community.

Can you tell us what your organisation does?

We build WooCommerce/e-commerce sites, marketing websites, intranets, and web applications using WordPress. A big part of our business is high-quality WordPress maintenance.

We work very hard at being a good fit for medium- and large-sized clients who want Enterprise-grade WordPress solutions with extreme uptime, while still maintaining the great bang for the buck that you have in your average freelancer. There’s a lot of people thats really good at building good-looking marketing websites, but there’s not a lot that do great maintenance. And its not strange at all; Maintenance is super-duper hard.

How does WordPress affect your business?

We more or less do only WordPress jobs, so WordPress is really important to us. What started as a dorm room project a world away is now how most of us put food on the table, so of course its important. We follow the changelogs and whats happening in the community carefully since everything has great impact for us and our clients.

How can WordCamp Stockholm and its attendees help the Swedish WordPress community?

When clients buy any kind of implementation that uses Open Source software someone must be responsible for that software. What we sell is our competence as WordPress developers and we try to do this with an Open-source business model. We sell our time and don’t package plugins or themes as “products” or charge based on “perceived value”. As such, the WordPress community is really important to us. We believe in a certain code of conduct, and talking about values and how you achieve your goals is important to us.

WordPress has a lot of value because it has a great community. By talking in the open about our values we will build a great community and more of us sell “the same thing”, which in turn will create a situation where clients are better at buying the kinds of services that we all provide.

Where do you think WordPress is and where does it fit in 5 years from now?

I think WordPress will be even more popular. It will have the ease of implementation and the rapid builds that we are accustomed to, but I think as a product it will be a more enterprise-friendly than it is today.

What opportunities are you hoping for at this WordCamp?

I hope to connect with a few developers that are serious with WordPress and would like to do other things than building simple marketing websites all day! We’re hiring!