Kenya will hold its inaugural WordCamp between November 12th and 13th this year at Naivasha Crayfish Campsite. The event is organised by David Mugo , a Social Media Professional and a web systems developer. Mugo, who is also part of the TEDx Nairobi and Dar-es-salaam  organising teams, says the event is budgeted to cost about KES 1.25 Million including transport and accommodation of participants. WordCamp has been held in other cities around the world since the first camp in San Francisco in 2006. The Kenya WordCamp is the second in Africa after the one held in Cape Town.
Mugo says the event targets 250 WordPress bloggers and developers including some from Tanzania and Uganda. WordPress is a popular open source Internet content publishing platform. WordPress was started by Matt Mullenweg in 2003. According to Alexa, 14% of the top 1 million websites in the world run on WordPress. Other statistics show Wordpress had been downloaded more than 50 Million times while 22% of all new domains registered in the United States are on WordPress. WordPress also offers a variety of free themes and plugins which extend the functionality of the system.

Mugo says that he has learned a lot from watching various WordCamp videos at WordPress.Tv which he says gives a lot of guidance on how to perform and achieve certain tasks on WordPress. This then inspired him to get involved in organising a WordCamp in Kenya. This took him about one and a half years to get approval from Auttomatic, the firm behind WordPress.

WordCamp Kenya will revolve around developers for WordPress and publishing on WordPress. This will see two parallel sessions for the two days focusing on the two groups. Mugo says there will be 30 speakers, including guests from Auttomatic and the poet Maya from Tanzania, with 15 speakers allocated for each of the sessions.

The content publishing session will include search engine optimisation, mobile blogging, WordPress on mobile platforms like Android, iOS and Symbian, getting your word out using social media and WordPress plugins and blogging on WordPress's own Wordpress.com.

Developers will learn on WordPress best practices, achieving best results in the shortest time , social media , going mobile and monetization of WordPress.

Those looking to attend can now purchase early bird tickets priced at KES 3,000. Later tickets will be priced at KES 4,000. Goodies for participants at the moment include KES 500 worth of Safaricom airtime for data and WordCamp T-shirts. WiFi will be provided at the camp and in the buses that the participants will leave Nairobi for Naivasha in.

Participants will be sleeping in tents. Also planned is a blogging competition where participants will be expected to blog on the WordCamp on their blogs, with the best entrant being awarded. There will also be a barbecue and poetry session around an open fire on the closing night.

More information and regsitration available at http://2011.kenya.wordcamp.org/.