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Joe A. Simpson, Jr.
Lead Organizer
Responsible for a number of roles including Lead, Publicity, Design, Printing, Video & A/V, Transportation, and travel details, WordCamp Santa Clarita is a labor of love for Joe.
Joe is a Front-End Web Developer and UX Designer specializing in WordPress solutions. During days he works at Metro LA, one of the nation’s top-five transit agencies, fighting the good fight to ease the commute around Los Angeles County. When their lead developer and CSS specialist both left to pursue other opportunities, Joe inherited a Headway-themed design (sans child theme) and the rest is history over a dozen years later.
Joe has also presented topics at WordCamp Chicago, WordCamp Los Angeles, WordCamp Orange County, WordCamp Riverside, WordCamp Long Beach, WordCamp Las Vegas, WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp US, and hosts the WordPress and Elementor Meetups in Santa Clarita.
After a life-threatening heart event and a brief leave of absence sparking a journey to rediscover the things that healed and nurtured him led him back to a love of WordPress and all things creative. Items on his bucket list were to start a local WordPress Meetup (check), host a WordCamp (check), and to speak at WordCamp Europe.
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Scott Dayman
Venue Wrangler
Scott has been using WordPress since the 1.0 days and enjoys bleeding-edge technology. He hosts several WordPress for local organizations, a client, and some friends & family sites. His passion is optimization and is always looking for ways to improve processes. After a long gap in WordCamp attendance, he attended several in the past year: Santa Clarita, Orange County, Long Beach, and Riverside.
He currently teaches second grade math and science after spending over a decade at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in engineering groups for the Galileo and Cassini missions, and a two-year dotcom stint with Petsmart. When he’s not teaching or nerding out, he hangs out with his wife, two kids, and a dog.
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Sean Conklin
Website Wrangler
Sean has been a full-stack PHP web developer since 2002. These days he’s founder at Coded Commerce, LLC focused on developing WooCommerce powered online stores for small business clients.
He launches and supports clients’ websites, shoring-up existing implementations, developing custom functionality, achieving high-performance and low-maintenance outcomes. Using the open-source WordPress powered architecture clients fully own their software, have vendor choice and minimize their monthly and per-transaction costs.
Sean also co-organizes and speaks at the West Valley WordPress Meetup as well as the WooCommerce Los Angeles Meetup.
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Shannon “SHAZA” Roberts
Budget Wrangler
Shannon is new to WordPress, and California. Relocating from the Big Apple to Ventura in 2018 she inherited a site at the non-profit where she had an artist studio. After a 25 year career in the fashion industry as a digital textile designer and project manager, the pivot to WordPress came naturally. Countless meetups and 4 WordCamps later she now works on enterprise-level sites as a WordPress assembler.
When not tinkering on websites Shannon can be found figure drawing at sketch nights, creating art under the name “SHAZA”, from coast to coast.
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Sumner Davenport
Speaker Wrangler
Our Speaker Wrangler, Sumner Davenport, had been designing websites for over 10 years using Microsoft and Adobe products before she was introduced to WordPress in 2008. WordPress quickly became her go-to website platform.
Sumner specializes in Web Accessibility on WordPress. Through her long-standing organization, she and her team build, maintain, evaluate and remediate WordPress websites to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA Success Criterion.
Sumner is active in accessibility and legal conferences and educational venues. She has presented at TechAccessOK and is presenting for the second year at John Slatin AccessU 2020. She regularly speaks on topics related to compliance issues for WordPress websites at Small Business conferences, WordCamp and local WordPress groups. She is the Founder of wA11y4all and wA11yWP through which she conducts ongoing educational events.
She is known for her engaging presentations: “Compliance, Traps & Trolls”, “The Ease of Accessibility and WordPress”, “Remediating a WordPress Site” and “Don’t Feed the Trolls”.
She is owned by a rescue dog named Tigger and his rescue cat, Merlin.
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Tange Brown-Simpson
Special Events Wrangler
Responsible for the Speakers’ Dinner/Reception and Afterparty, Tange is an Instructional Aide to the Speech Pathologist at Castaic Elementary school in the Santa Clarita Valley. She works with special needs children to improve their speech intelligibility. She is currently completing coursework at Pasadena City College in pursuit of a Speech and Language Pathologist Assistant degree.
Prior to this career, Tange worked in entertainment as a Stage Manager at NBC Television and Warner Bros Television working on shows such as Family Matters and NBC News Sunrise. When she’s not helping her husband with WordCamp Santa Clarita, she is found playing Candy Crush and is excitedly planning to travel to Porto, Portugal this summer for WordCamp Europe with Joe.
