The Connections We Must Build, Right Here at WordCamp Canada

I’m publishing this post on the WordCamp Canada site and the Edmonton WordPress Meetup site (wpyeg.ca) via WordLand (wordland.social). WPYEG.ca is federated with ActivityPub, so people following it on platforms like Mastodon will see this post too. (For example, edmontonian.social, mstdn.ca, ottawa.place, and wptoots.social.)

WordLand is the work of Dave Winer. Dave is our first announced WCEH speaker, the inventor of RSS, and a visionary for the web we hoped we’d get — and still believe we can create. 

Dave has blogged a lot about WordLand for several years — well before it had a name, as I recall. I remember him indirectly revealing the motivation behind WordLand (and also ActivityPub) last year in a post titled Why we’re lucky WordPress is here and other topics:

WordPress is, among other things, a perfect time capsule of open technologies from the early days of innovation on the web, and widely deployed and able to deliver all their benefits, if we widen our view of social media to be a social web, and simply create places where posts with and without titles are equally supported. It’s that simple. Without WordPress we would have to build all that, and wait for it to deploy in numbers, to matter in the market. All we have to do now is make the connections. #

That stuck with me. 

We do need to make the connections, now more than ever. 

Here’s Dave’s “big vision” for WordLand, a more technical “how-to” dive into it, and his thoughts about why it makes sense to bring this to WordCamp Canada.

What do you think?

*Canadians may recognize my title riffs on John Ralston Saul‘s brilliant 2017 essay “The Bridges Canada Must Build, Right Here at Home.” I used to have my students read and respond to it at MacEwan University. It’s relevant, on other levels, to the kind of web we want and our conference themes. You should read it if you haven’t. Thanks to the Wayback Machine you can.