OmFest: A Celebration of Curiosity, Connection, and the Future  🔗 **Source:** [OmFest: A Celebration of Curiosity, Connection, and the Future](https://ma.tt/2026/09/omfest-soon/) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [omfest, event-design, community-building, open-source-events, curiosity-culture] > author: Matt (Matt Mullenweg) > source: ma.tt > reference: https://ma.tt/2026/09/omfest-soon/ > date created: 2026-09-18 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🏷️ Title **OmFest: A Celebration of Curiosity, Connection, and the Future** — Matt (Matt Mullenweg), ma.tt, ~870 words. A short announcement post, part personal, part event design manifesto, cross-posting the OmFest.co launch text for a twelve-hour gathering in San Francisco on September 29, 2026, marking what would have been Om's 60th birthday. ## 🧭 Table of Contents - References (in-page) — the six links the post actually carries - Summary — what happened, why it matters, stakeholders, risks, bottom line - Main Content — section-by-section reconstruction plus Notes - References (primary sources) - Paraphrase — paragraph by paragraph - Newsletter — WordPress-flavored write-up - Action Items — DevRel / OSPO / Community / WordPress subteams - Hypotheses, Methodology, Questions, Future Research - Implications — practice, policy, security, education, funding - Learning Styles, Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA), DEIB - Logical Validity, DARVO, Conclusion - Refactor Appendix — Literature Split Pad, Atomic Split Pad, Fleeting Queue ## 🔗 References (in-page) The post is **not** uncited. Six outbound links appear in the captured body: - `https://omfest.co/` — the OmFest site, described as the source of the cross-posted text - `https://www.swedishamericanhall.com/` — Swedish American Hall, the venue - `https://sf.wordcamp.org/2006/` — referenced as the first WordCamp, held at the same venue - `https://sf.wordcamp.org/2006/schedule/` — the 2006 schedule, cited for Om's "Blogs and Journalism" session - `https://ma.tt/2026/06/om-forever/` — the author's earlier post on marking the day - A Google Form (`docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc...`) — the open call for contributions - One image asset: `i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2026/09/b97df-all-roads-lead-to-om-1.jpg` ## 📝 Summary **What happened.** Matt announces that OmFest has come together: a twelve-hour event on September 29, 2026 at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, on what would have been Om's 60th birthday. The bulk of the post is cross-posted from OmFest.co and lays out the format: short "Present Future" talks whose only brief is to teach the room something the speaker sees before everyone else; ambient exhibits (Om's photography, a watch/craft exhibit called TIME, a communal writing table called Field Notes, and Om's Shelf of books that empties as attendees take them); hands-on sessions run by people from Om's different worlds; and OM/60, sixty small discoveries hidden through the day. Check-in replaces company-and-title badges with a self-selected list of the "worlds" through which you knew Om, feeding a physical map of the network built live over the day. The day arcs from morning coffee and conversation through unstructured wandering to evening toasts and then DesiParty — bhangra, Asian Underground, electronica. **Why it matters.** The post is not only a memorial notice. It contains an explicit event-design thesis and an open-source commitment: the organizers intend to document formats, designs, code, templates, check-in, and programming, and release as much as they can so other events can reuse and improve them. For anyone in WordPress community organizing, DevRel, or OSPO event work, that makes OmFest a potential upstream artifact, not just a private gathering. **Stakeholders.** The author as organizer; Om's family, friends, and professional circles across photography, journalism, technology, GigaOm, investing, WordPress, India, coffee, pens and ink, design, and music; contributors already making textiles, tea ceremonies, photographs, and sessions; prospective attendees who never met Om; and — downstream — event organizers who might inherit the released artifacts. **Risks.** The open-source commitment is hedged ("as much of it as we can") with no license, repository, or timeline named. Attendance is described warmly but no ticketing, capacity, cost, accessibility, or travel information appears in the captured body. The identity-based check-in is generous in intent but functions as a disclosure prompt; people with tenuous or complicated ties to Om, or who prefer not to declare affiliations, have no stated opt-out. A network map built live from attendee input is also, structurally, a social graph rendered in public. **Bottom line.** A warm, specific, unusually design-literate announcement that quietly proposes a reusable alternative to the badge-and-keynote conference. Treat the open-sourcing promise as the load-bearing claim to follow up on after September 29. ## 📖 Main Content The post has a short authorial preamble followed by a cross-posted block with six headed sections. **Preamble.** The author reports OmFest is coming together, praises the new website, expresses confidence that Om would be impressed by the attendee list, and names the venue: the Swedish American Hall, the same venue as the first WordCamp, where Om spoke on Blogs and Journalism. He adds a parenthetical appeal — the videos are lost to "digirot" and he has been looking everywhere for recordings. **Framing.** September 29 would have been Om's 60th birthday. The author says he did not want a traditional memorial, because Om loved bringing interesting people together and loved a festival that taught him something new. Om's curiosity is listed across technology, journalism, photography, investing, watches, pens, coffee, design, music, India, New York, San Francisco. The event is anchored on a statement attributed to Om about attention to the present revealing the future. **Present Future.** Instead of tributes or keynotes, short talks with one brief: teach us something you're seeing before everyone else sees it. Explicitly no pitches, no career retrospectives, and no requirement to talk about Om at all. Sample prompts given: AI-generated imagery and photography, why physical objects gain meaning as life goes digital, glasses becoming computers, what handwriting does to thinking. **A Festival of Om's Curiosity.** Four named ambient installations — Through Om's Lens (photography gallery), TIME (watches as a way into craft and collecting), Field Notes (communal writing table with fine paper, fountain pens, ink; keep what you write or leave it to be bound into a commemorative book), Om's Shelf (books he recommended, starting full and emptying into other hands). Drop-in hands-on moments: photography tutorial, notebook binding, watch mechanics, an unfamiliar coffee, a tea ceremony. Woven through: OM/60, sixty small discoveries hidden throughout. **All Roads Lead to Om.** The declared centerpiece is not any object. Check-in asks attendees to choose the worlds through which they knew Om rather than company and title, then to add themselves to a physical map, marking how they knew him and whom he introduced them to. The map starts nearly empty and fills over the day. The organizing question: who will meet because of Om that Om never had the chance to introduce. **From Ideas to Celebration.** A deliberate arc — morning of coffee, breakfast, books, photography, conversation; a deliberately unstructured middle; evening short stories and a toast; then bars, lowered lights, louder music, and DesiParty. **Version 1.0.** A set of open design questions about registration, curiosity-over-status programming, serving both two-hour and twelve-hour visits, and encouraging connection without forcing networking. OmFest is framed as an experiment whose outputs will be documented and open sourced. **Come Build with Us.** Contributors are already supplying photographs, a textile, tea and ceremonies, watches, eyewear, books, music, writing, and stories. The author says whole parts of Om's world remain undiscovered and calls that the point. Two asks: tell them what Om introduced you to, and submit ideas via the linked form. Closing: you don't need to have known Om, only to be curious. ### 🗒️ Notes - The captured body never gives Om's surname. "GigaOm" appears once, in the list of worlds, which is the only in-text hook to the wider public identity. Any identification beyond that is reader-supplied context, not the author's text — treat it as such. - The post never states that Om has died. It is inferable from "would have turned 60," "a traditional memorial," and "raise a glass to Om on his 60th," but the word never appears. The register is celebratory throughout. - WordPress appears exactly twice: the WordCamp 2006 venue lineage in the preamble, and "WordPress" as one of the twelve check-in worlds. This is not a WordPress project post; it is a personal post by a WordPress-central figure that touches the project's history. - The strongest transferable content is the design critique implied by the format: badges encode status, keynotes encode hierarchy, and unstructured time is treated as a feature to be budgeted rather than a scheduling failure. - "Digirot" (lost 2006 WordCamp video) is a small but real digital-preservation flag from inside the WordPress community's own first event. ## 📚 References Primary sources, preferred order: 1. The post itself — https://ma.tt/2026/09/omfest-soon/ (the only authoritative record of these claims). 2. OmFest.co — https://omfest.co/ — the canonical event site the body block is cross-posted from; the place to verify schedule, capacity, and access details the post omits. 3. The author's earlier post — https://ma.tt/2026/06/om-forever/ — stated origin of the thinking about how to mark the day. 4. sf.wordcamp.org/2006 and its schedule page — primary evidence for the venue lineage and Om's "Blogs and Journalism" session. 5. Swedish American Hall — https://www.swedishamericanhall.com/ — venue of record; the practical source for accessibility and capacity facts absent from the post. 6. The contribution form (docs.google.com) — the live intake channel named in the post. No secondary or third-party sources are cited in the captured body, and none are needed for the factual claims made. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase **Preamble.** Preparations are going well, the site looks good, and the guest list is strong. The venue carries history: it hosted the first WordCamp, where Om spoke about blogs and journalism, and the recordings appear to be permanently lost. **Framing.** The date is Om's 60th birthday. A conventional memorial felt wrong, because Om's own preference was for gatherings that convened people and taught him something. The event is built around a line of his connecting close attention to the present with visibility of the future. **Present Future.** Talks are short and constrained to one job: show the room something early. Self-promotion and biography are ruled out, and speakers need not mention Om. **Festival.** Four standing exhibits give people something to encounter between talks, each tied to one of Om's enthusiasms, and two of them (the writing table, the bookshelf) are designed to change state over the day. Small hands-on sessions and a hidden set of sixty facts fill the gaps. **All Roads Lead to Om.** Registration is repurposed as the main artifact. Instead of declaring employer and role, attendees declare their relationship to Om and then physically wire themselves into a growing map of who introduced whom. The hoped-for result is new introductions Om can no longer make himself. **From Ideas to Celebration.** The schedule is shaped as a curve: quiet and conversational in the morning, deliberately loose in the middle, ceremonial in the early evening, and a dance party by night. **Version 1.0.** The organizers pose their own open questions about registration, curiosity-driven programming, variable-length attendance, and unforced connection — and commit to documenting and open sourcing what works so other events can build on it. **Come Build with Us.** Contributions are already arriving across many media; more are invited, both stories about what Om introduced people to and concrete proposals via a form. Prior acquaintance with Om is not a requirement for attending. ## 📰 Newsletter **All roads lead to Om — and one of them runs through the Swedish American Hall** If you've ever argued that the conference badge is the worst piece of design in our industry, [Matt has a post for you](https://ma.tt/2026/09/omfest-soon/). OmFest lands September 29 at the [Swedish American Hall](https://www.swedishamericanhall.com/) — yes, *that* hall, the one that hosted [the first WordCamp in 2006](https://sf.wordcamp.org/2006/), where Om spoke about blogs and journalism. The videos, Matt notes, have been lost to digirot. If you have a shoebox of 2006 tapes, this is officially your moment. The event is a twelve-hour celebration of Om's curiosity on what would have been his 60th birthday, and the format is the interesting part. Talks have exactly one rule: teach us something you're seeing before everyone else sees it. No pitches. No career retrospectives. You don't even have to talk about Om — which is, on reflection, a braver programming decision than most of us have ever made. Then there's check-in. Instead of a badge with your company and title, you pick the worlds you knew Om through — photography, journalism, technology, GigaOm, investing, WordPress, India, coffee, pens and ink, design, music, or friends and family — and then add yourself to a physical map of who introduced whom. It starts nearly empty and fills as the day goes. Community organizers: this is a live sociogram built by the attendees, and it costs less than a badge printer. The line that should make every Community and Training team member sit up: OmFest is being treated as an experiment, and the organizers intend to document formats, designs, code, templates, check-in, and programming and open source as much as they can. September 29 isn't the end, Matt writes — it's version 1.0. WordPress has ~700 meetups looking for better onboarding rituals. If a check-in flow designed to make strangers talk to each other ships under an open license, somebody in our Community team should be first in line to fork it. And if you just want to come: [the contribution form is open](https://omfest.co/), and the stated entry requirement is curiosity. ## ✅ Action Items **DevRel** - Steal the talk brief verbatim for your next community event CFP: one constraint, "teach us something you're seeing before everyone else sees it," no pitches, no retrospectives. Measure whether submission quality changes. - Pilot relationship-based check-in ("how do you know this community?") against title-based badges at one meetup and compare hallway-conversation counts. **OSPO** - Watch for the promised OmFest release; if artifacts land, assess license, reusability, and whether your org's events could adopt the check-in and mapping templates. Log it as a potential upstream dependency, not a curiosity. - Draft the counterpart policy: what would *your* org open source from its own events (run of show, templates, code)? Use OmFest as the forcing example. **Community** - Add a "digital preservation" ticket: the first WordCamp's session videos are reported lost. Audit what WordCamp and meetup recordings from 2006–2012 still exist and where. - Prototype the "unstructured middle" as an explicit block on a WordCamp grid rather than as leftover time, and survey attendees on it. **WordPress subteams** - *Core* — none directly; do not manufacture one. - *Core Performance* — not applicable to this source. - *Core AI* — note the post's framing question about AI-generated imagery and photography as a public-perception signal worth tracking, not a roadmap input. - *Core Program Team* — borrow the "version 1.0, document what works, release it" framing for retrospective write-ups of release cycles. - *Mobile* — not applicable. - *Playground* — consider a Playground demo of a lightweight event check-in/connection-mapping site as a reusable blueprint. - *Community* — primary owner of the check-in experiment, the unstructured-time pilot, and any adoption of released OmFest artifacts. - *Training* — turn "design a session around curiosity instead of status" into a Learn WordPress module for meetup organizers. - *Marketing* — the WordCamp 2006 venue lineage is a strong, true story hook; verify against the 2006 site before publishing. - *Support* — not applicable. - *Design* — study the check-in-as-artifact idea; sketch what a status-free WordCamp badge would look like. - *Documentation* — capture the lost-video issue in the community history docs; document what preservation practice should be going forward. - *Photos* — a photography gallery built from one person's archive is a model for curated Photo Directory collections; propose one. - *TV* — surface a preservation pass on the oldest WordCamp recordings and flag gaps publicly. - *Polyglots* — nothing to translate here; the post is English-only and personal. - *Accessibility* — if any OmFest artifacts are released, review them for WCAG 2.2 AA before the community reuses them; a physical map and a communal writing table both need non-visual and non-manual equivalents. - *Meta* — check whether sf.wordcamp.org/2006 archives are stable and preserved. - *CLI* — not applicable. - *Hosting* — not applicable. - *Tide* — not applicable. - *Openverse* — a possible home for openly licensed event photography if contributors choose open licenses; raise as an option, not an expectation. - *Themes / Plugins* — a small "community connection map" block or plugin is an obvious downstream build if the OmFest code is released. **The WPOCC (The WP Open Community Collective)** — track the open-sourcing commitment as a case study in community-run event infrastructure; if artifacts ship, evaluate stewardship. **FAIR** — the lost-video problem is a federated-preservation argument: assets that live in one place rot. Use it as a concrete example in FAIR advocacy. ## 🧪 Hypotheses 1. Relationship-based check-in produces more cross-group introductions per attendee than title-based badges. *Test:* A/B two comparable meetups; count self-reported new contacts outside one's own subcommunity at 48 hours. 2. A talk brief that forbids pitches and retrospectives raises the share of attendees reporting they learned something new. *Test:* post-event single-question survey against a prior event with an open CFP. 3. A visible, filling network artifact increases dwell time relative to a static exhibit. *Test:* timed observation at the installation versus a control exhibit. 4. Deliberately unstructured mid-day time increases satisfaction for long-stay attendees but decreases it for short-stay attendees. *Test:* segment satisfaction scores by recorded time on site. 5. The open-sourcing commitment will be partially fulfilled: some templates and copy released, little or no code. *Test:* check for a public repository or release post within 90 days of September 29, 2026. 6. Events framed as "version 1.0" recur more often than events framed as one-off memorials. *Test:* longitudinal check for a 2027 edition. ## 📊 Methodology This analysis works only from the captured Reader body of the post — roughly 870 words, including one image and six outbound links. No external pages were fetched; claims about OmFest.co, the 2006 WordCamp schedule, or the venue are treated as unverified pointers. The post itself is a first-person announcement with no data, no citations to research, and no falsifiable claims about outcomes; it is evidence of *intent and design*, not of results. Where WordPress-ecosystem context appears in this analysis (meetup counts, preservation practice, subteam mapping), it is analyst-supplied and marked as such rather than attributed to the author. ## ❓ Questions - What license, repository, and timeline will the promised open-sourcing use, and who owns the release afterward? - Is the event ticketed, capped, or free, and what does it cost to attend? None of this is in the captured body. - What accommodations exist for attendees who cannot navigate a twelve-hour standing-and-mingling format, or who cannot use the physical map? - Does the check-in have an opt-out for people who don't want their affiliations rendered publicly? - Who decides what goes into the commemorative bound book of Field Notes writings, and what happens to writings people leave behind? - Were the 2006 WordCamp videos ever archived anywhere — and is anyone systematically checking? ## 🔮 Future Research - A post-event study of the network map: does it produce measurable introductions that persist at three and six months? - Comparative analysis of status-free registration across events (OmFest, unconferences, Open Space) and its effect on newcomer retention. - A preservation audit of early WordCamp media as a case study in community-owned digital decay. - Whether "curiosity as the entry requirement" broadens or narrows demographic mix in practice — the claim is generous but untested. - Longitudinal follow-up on whether open-sourced event design artifacts actually get adopted, or join the large pile of released-and-ignored community templates. ## 💡 Implications **Practice.** The most portable ideas cost little: a one-sentence talk brief, a check-in question about relationship rather than employer, exhibits that change state over the day, and unstructured time as a scheduled block. Any WordCamp or meetup could pilot all four next quarter. **Policy.** "Open source as much of it as we can" is a commitment without a mechanism. Communities that want to inherit this work should ask now for a license and a repository rather than after the fact; the same standard OSPOs apply to code should apply to event design artifacts. **Security and privacy.** A live, physical map of who knows whom and who introduced whom is a social graph in public view. Attendees may be disclosing professional relationships, employer history, or personal ties they would not put on a badge. Consent, photography of the map, and post-event retention of that data all deserve explicit handling. The captured post does not address any of this. **Education.** The format is a legitimate pedagogical argument: short, constrained, novelty-first talks plus hands-on micro-sessions plus ambient artifacts is close to multimodal instructional design. Training teams could reuse the structure for contributor onboarding days. **Funding.** Nothing in the captured body discusses cost, sponsorship, or who pays. An event with galleries, fine stationery, tea ceremonies, and a twelve-hour venue booking implies significant private underwriting, which limits direct replicability for volunteer-run community events. Anyone adopting the model should budget the ideas, not the production values. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - **Visual** — Strong. One hero image, a photography gallery, an exhibit, and a physical map are all described; the map is the post's central visual metaphor. - **Aural** — Moderate. Short talks, storytelling, and an explicit music program (bhangra, Asian Underground, electronica) are named, but the post itself carries no audio. - **Verbal** — Strong. The piece is prose-led, with clear section headings and a memorable anchoring quotation. - **Kinesthetic** — Strong. Notebook binding, watch mechanics, a writing table, taking a book off a shelf, physically adding yourself to a map, dancing. Unusually high for a blog post. - **Logical** — Moderate. There is a clear design argument (status-free registration, curiosity-first programming) but no data, metrics, or stated success criteria. - **Social** — Very strong. Connection is the explicit thesis; nearly every element is designed around meeting people. - **Solitary** — Moderate. Writing at the Field Notes table, browsing the shelf, and the hidden OM/60 discoveries all support solo participation. - **Naturalistic** — Low. No outdoor, environmental, or ecological content; the closest analogue is the taxonomy of Om's "worlds." - **Reading level** — Approximately grade 9–10 (US). Short declarative sentences, concrete nouns, minimal jargon; the only unglossed coinage is "digirot," and "DesiParty," "Asian Underground," and "bhangra" assume cultural familiarity. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment Mapped against WCAG 2.2 AA, for the post as captured. 1. **Text alternatives (1.1.1)** — Fail/unknown. The single image is captured with an empty alt attribute. A decorative-only reading is possible, but the file name suggests it carries the "all roads lead to Om" concept, which would need a description. 2. **Adaptable structure (1.3.1)** — Pass. Real headings segment every section; content order is logical and reads correctly linearized. 3. **Distinguishable (1.4.3, 1.4.4, 1.4.10, 1.4.12)** — Unknown from capture; depends on the ma.tt theme. Text is reflowable prose with no images of text, which is favorable. 4. **Keyboard and navigation (2.1.1, 2.4.4, 2.4.11)** — Mostly pass on link operability, but link text is weak in places: one link is the whole sentence "If there's something you think people should experience, see, hear, taste, read, or learn that day, tell us," and another is a long descriptive clause. Purpose is inferable in context; standalone link lists would be poor. 5. **Readable and predictable (3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.2.3)** — Pass on language and consistency. "Digirot" and "DesiParty" are undefined terms; a brief gloss would help non-native readers and screen-reader users encountering unfamiliar coinages. 6. **Input assistance (3.3.x)** — Out of scope for the post itself; the linked Google Form is the actual input surface and is not assessable from the capture. Third-party forms frequently fail 3.3.2 labeling expectations and should be checked. 7. **Cognitive load and timing (2.2.x, 3.2.x, 2.4.6)** — Pass for the post: short paragraphs, descriptive headings, no motion or timeouts. For the *event*, a twelve-hour unstructured format with a physical, spatial map has real cognitive and mobility barriers that the post does not address. ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment - **Cultural breadth** — Strong. India, New York, San Francisco, bhangra, Asian Underground, tea ceremony, and DesiParty are woven in as substance, not decoration, and are treated as central to the honoree's identity rather than as exotic garnish. - **Inclusive language** — Strong. Plain, warm, second-person, no gatekeeping vocabulary. The explicit closing — you don't need to have known Om, you only need to be curious — is a deliberate lowering of the entry bar. - **Neurodiversity support** — Mixed. Positive: the ban on pitches, the option of solitary activities, and the range of participation depths. Negative: a twelve-hour event with a deliberately unstructured middle, loud music, and mingling as the core activity is demanding for many people, and no quiet space or sensory information is mentioned. - **Representation** — Partial, by construction. The list of worlds is broad, but attendance is anchored in one person's network, which inherits that network's existing skews. Nothing in the post addresses who is missing from it. - **Psychological safety** — Mostly good intent with one gap. Removing company and title from badges lowers status pressure meaningfully. But asking people to publicly declare their relationship to the honoree, and to mark who introduced them to whom, is a disclosure request; no opt-out or minimal-participation path is stated. ## ✅ Logical Validity **Where the reasoning is strong.** The central inference is sound and well supported by its own premises: if the person being honored valued convening and learning over ceremony, then a festival of short novel talks and hands-on sessions is a better fit than a memorial of eulogies. The author states the premise, states the design consequence, and the design elements follow consistently. The critique of conventional conference registration is likewise coherent — badges encode status, so removing status from badges plausibly changes the opening move of a conversation. The "version 1.0" framing is intellectually honest: it treats the event as a hypothesis, poses its own open questions, and commits to publishing results rather than declaring success in advance. **Fallacies.** 1. **Unfalsifiable claim / no stated success criterion** — located in the "All Roads Lead to Om" closing paragraph: the conditional "If OmFest works, his network won't just be documented that day. It'll grow." No definition of "works" is offered, and "grow" has no threshold, so the claim cannot fail. *Fix:* name a measurable marker — for example, a count of introductions logged on the map that produce a follow-up contact within 30 days — so the experiment the author says he is running can actually return a result. 2. **Non sequitur (gap reframed as virtue)** — located in "Come Build with Us": "We haven't discovered whole parts of Om's world yet. That's the point." An acknowledged incompleteness in the organizers' knowledge does not itself establish that incompleteness was the design intent; the inference from "we don't know" to "that's the point" skips a step. *Fix:* separate the two claims — state plainly that the picture is incomplete, and separately state that the event is designed to surface unknown parts of his network, which is a design choice that can be described and evaluated on its own. **Tone of voice.** Warm, plainspoken, confident, and unusually restrained for the genre. First-person singular for the personal frame, first-person plural for the collective build. Sentences are short and declarative; sentiment is carried by concrete nouns (fountain pens, a shelf that empties) rather than adjectives. Grief is present only by implication — the word "memorial" appears once, and only to be rejected. The closing shifts register into direct invitation. ## 🛡️ DARVO Analysis **Deny** — None present. The post makes no accusations and deflects none; the only negation is the author declining a traditional memorial format for himself, which is a preference, not a denial of wrongdoing. **Attack** — None present. Conventional conferences are implicitly critiqued (badges with company and title, keynotes, career retrospectives) but no person, organization, or group is targeted. **Reverse victim and offender** — Not applicable to this source. There is no conflict narrative, no aggrieved party, and no role-swapping. This is an invitation and an event-design brief; DARVO has no purchase on it. ## 🎯 Conclusion **Bottom line.** A short, affectionate announcement that smuggles in a serious proposal: registration, programming, and ambient design can be built around curiosity and relationships instead of status, and the resulting artifacts should be released for others to reuse. The emotional frame is what makes it readable; the design thesis and the open-sourcing commitment are what make it worth keeping. **Next steps.** (1) Calendar a check after September 29, 2026 for the promised release and record what actually ships. (2) Pilot the two cheapest ideas — the one-sentence talk brief and relationship-based check-in — at one WordPress meetup and measure. (3) Open a preservation thread on the lost first-WordCamp session videos; that is a concrete, actionable community loss named in the post. (4) Verify the event's access, cost, and capacity details on OmFest.co before recommending it to anyone. ## 🧱 Refactor Appendix ### Literature Split Pad ### L1 — Event design as an open-source artifact `atom/literature/h1` > [!quote] > We're treating OmFest as an experiment. We'll document what works—formats, designs, code, templates, check-in, programming—and open source as much of it as we can. Other events can take the best ideas and make them better. The strongest evidence claim in the post: the organizers commit to releasing the event's design outputs. Load-bearing for any downstream community adoption, and the one promise with a checkable outcome. ### L2 — Registration reassigned from status to relationship `atom/literature/h2` > [!quote] > The most important part, however, isn't any of these objects. At check-in, instead of a badge with your company and title, you'll choose the worlds through which you knew Om: photography, journalism, technology, GigaOm, investing, WordPress, India, coffee, pens and ink, design, music, or simply friends and family. The author explicitly ranks this above every exhibit. It is the single most transferable mechanic in the piece and the cheapest to pilot. ### L3 — The design questions stated as open problems `atom/literature/h3` > [!quote] > What we're building shouldn't end on September 29. What does registration look like if it's designed to help strangers talk to each other? How do you design a conference around curiosity instead of status? How do you make something that works for a two-hour visit or a twelve-hour one? How does a room encourage connection without forcing networking? Four reusable research questions, stated by the organizer rather than by a critic. Usable verbatim as a framing for community event retrospectives. ### Atomic Split Pad #### Z1 — A talk brief with exactly one constraint `atom/zettel/z1` Candidate Zettel: *"Teach us something you're seeing before everyone else sees it" is a complete CFP.* Banning pitches and retrospectives removes the two dominant failure modes of community talks in one line. Links to: CFP design, unconference formats, novelty as a programming criterion. #### Z2 — Exhibits that change state are participation, not decoration Candidate Zettel: a bookshelf that empties and a writing table whose output is bound into a book convert passive displays into artifacts with a before and after. Links to: ambient participation design, commons-building, slow media. #### Z3 — A live network map is a social graph with consent implications Candidate Zettel: rendering who-introduced-whom in a room is warm in intent and identical in structure to a graph database. Links to: privacy by design, community data stewardship, attendee consent. #### Z4 — Community media rots without a custodian Candidate Zettel: the first WordCamp's session videos are reported lost. Single-location hosting plus volunteer custody plus fifteen years equals loss. Links to: FAIR, digital preservation, WordPress TV archives. ### Fleeting Queue - `atom/fleeting/f1` — "You only need to be curious" as an entry requirement: generous framing, untested in effect. Does it broaden the room or just flatter it? - Does anyone actually have 2006 WordCamp recordings? Worth asking in the community archives channels. - "Digirot" — good coinage, check whether it is the author's or borrowed. - The unstructured middle is the bravest scheduling decision in the post; find out afterward whether attendees rated it highest or lowest. - Budget check: which OmFest elements survive translation to a volunteer-run, zero-sponsor meetup? - Follow-up: does a 2027 edition happen, and is it still called version 1.x? <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/OmFest A Celebration of Curiosity, Connection, and the Future.md|OmFest: A Celebration of Curiosity, Connection, and the Future by Matt]] ## Highlights - Instead of tributes or keynotes, we’ll host a series of short talks with one simple challenge: teach us something you’re seeing before everyone else sees it. No pitches, no career retrospectives. You don’t even have to talk about Om. What happens to photography when anyone can generate the perfect image with AI? Why do physical objects become more meaningful as our lives become more digital? Are glasses becoming computers? What does handwriting do to the way we think? Different subjects, same goal: everyone leaves knowing something they didn’t know when they arrived. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2sam8ws50st6p7j0wpvzc3a)) - Note: Z1 — A talk brief with exactly one constraint is a complete CFP. Banning pitches and retrospectives removes the two dominant failure modes of community talks in a single line. - Tags: atom/zettel/z1 - The most important part, however, isn’t any of these objects. At check-in, instead of a badge with your company and title, you’ll choose the worlds through which you knew Om: photography, journalism, technology, GigaOm, investing, WordPress, India, coffee, pens and ink, design, music, or simply friends and family. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2sam2qvbn1hdgy541nd5cs4)) - Note: L2 — Registration reassigned from status to relationship, ranked by the author above every exhibit. Cheapest transferable mechanic in the piece; pilot it against title-based badges at one meetup. Note the unaddressed consent/opt-out gap. - Tags: atom/literature/h2, action/h2 - The question I keep asking myself: who will meet because of Om that Om never had the chance to introduce? If OmFest works, his network won’t just be documented that day. It’ll grow. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2samdqrxskmft9a6ad0vfve)) - Note: Fallacy — unfalsifiable claim / no stated success criterion. "If OmFest works" is never defined and "grow" has no threshold, so the conditional cannot fail. Fix: name a measurable marker (e.g. introductions logged on the map that produce a follow-up contact within 30 days) so the stated experiment can actually return a result. - Tags: fallacy/unfalsifiable-claim - What we’re building shouldn’t end on September 29. What does registration look like if it’s designed to help strangers talk to each other? How do you design a conference around curiosity instead of status? How do you make something that works for a two-hour visit or a twelve-hour one? How does a room encourage connection without forcing networking? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2sam5fj56vmwcyxdy2r5pv4)) - Note: L3 — Four reusable research questions stated by the organizer, not a critic. Usable verbatim as a framing for WordCamp and meetup retrospectives. - Tags: action/h3, atom/literature/h3 - We’re treating OmFest as an experiment. We’ll document what works—formats, designs, code, templates, check-in, programming—and open source as much of it as we can. Other events can take the best ideas and make them better. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2sakz5rc2nd2pbjp5kf5pqx)) - Note: L1 — Strongest evidence claim in the post: an explicit commitment to document and open source the event's design artifacts. This is the one promise with a checkable outcome; track for a license, repo, and release within 90 days of 2026-09-29. - Tags: action/h1, atom/literature/h1 - People from across Om’s life are building OmFest together. Some are contributing photographs. Someone is making a textile; another is bringing tea and guiding ceremonies. Others are helping with watches, eyewear, books, music, writing, and stories. We haven’t discovered whole parts of Om’s world yet. That’s the point. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2samgnsk2p6729ythbcbvq4)) - Note: Fallacy — non sequitur (gap reframed as virtue). An acknowledged incompleteness in the organizers' knowledge does not establish that the incompleteness was the design intent. Fix: separate the claims — state that the picture is incomplete, and separately state that the event is designed to surface unknown parts of the network, a design choice that can be evaluated on its own. - Tags: fallacy/non-sequitur - And if you just want to come, come. You don’t need to have known Om. You only need to be curious. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m2samark7vnaebn2tttv0psk)) - Note: F1 — "You only need to be curious" as the stated entry requirement. Generous framing, untested effect: does it broaden the room or flatter it? Worth measuring against actual newcomer mix. - Tags: atom/fleeting/f1