We are thrilled to welcome Automattician Jack Lenox as our 2016 WordCamp Asheville keynote speaker! Jack is a design engineer and a frequent WordCamp speaker. He lives in Keswick, in the English Lake District, and he’s also a world traveler, vegan, humanist, and a co-organizer of last year’s ThemeConf, a conference in the UK for themers, designers, and front-end developers. 

For the past few years, Jack has been experimenting with new approaches to theme development, specifically with how to use the REST API to create seamless, super fast loading  single-page applications.

For his keynote, Jack will adopt a broader, less technical vantage point and talk about the power of the open-source community, in which WordPress is proudly entrenched. Jack describes his talk, “The Power of Open,” as such:

“On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman announced to the world his intention to create a complete operating system from the ground up. He called it GNU, which stands for GNU’s Not Unix. This also marked the launch of the free software movement. Now, more than 30 years later, we gather at one of many hundreds of WordCamps, that occur throughout the world, every year. And we represent just one small segment of a much grander pie.

“When I made my first steps into this community in 2008, I took a lot of the freedoms we have for granted. Since then, I have learnt a lot about freedom (both with an upper and lower case F), and I can’t help but find the ubiquity of open source software (and hardware) awe-inspiring. This talk will include a number of the most inspiring things I have learned about during my time in our industry, and will hopefully underline the importance of this year’s theme: Spark. Create. Collaborate.”

Jack will also deliver a developer track talk to relay his experiences working with the REST API and what the future holds for theme development. 

You can find Jack on Twitter and at https://jacklenox.com, you’ll find some of his travel logs and general musings on life.