Who is the Intended Audience of WordCamp?

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Is it Developers?  Is it bloggers?  Is it students? Is it people building there own websites? Since last 3-4 WordCamps that has happened in India and the discussion that has followed at the end of those camps has finally forced me to share my concerns and understanding about intended audience.

I believe that the intended audience for a WordCamp is user of WordPress and it is just incidental that some of the users are also developers.

Let’s start by looking at what WordCamp central says about it.

“WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress.”

 

Interesting isn’t it, but what does “Everything WordPress” mean?

I believe it means anything and everything that a WordPress user needs, and mind you, not a developer but user. This is an important distinction and cause of confusion.

I also believe that videos published on WordPress.tv agrees to agenda of WordCamp, so here is a quick and small list of talks from various WordCamps :

  1. Lisa Sabin-Wilson: Scoping Projects To Reduce Stress, Headaches and Angry Mobs
  2. Patrick Rauland: How to Build a Sustainable Business Using the Freemium Model 
  3. John Lynn: Can You Make Money Blogging?
  4. Matt Medeiros: Land Bigger Clients While Working From An Island
  5. Frederick Townes: 15 Secrets… of Top Media Companies
  6. Chris Lema: Success in Distributed Contexts
  7. Noah Dyer: Growth
  8. Adrian Roselli: Content Strategy
  9. Brad Munro: Effective Marketing in a Digital World
  10. Justin Briggs: SEO for Bloggers
  11. Nir Eyal: Automatic customers: How to design user habits

I purposely picked talks that were popular but had nothing to do exclusively with WordPress, but are important for people using WordPress. I agree to the fact that most of the talks on WordPress.tv are related to development using WordPress, but to assume that WordCamps are only for WordPress developers is big mistake.

Trust me when I say we are lucky that WordCamp attracts so many users, at almost every other Camp like Joomla and Drupal in India attracts only developers and they keep discussing how do they attract more users.

 

4 thoughts on “Who is the Intended Audience of WordCamp?”

  1. Interesting read Amit.

    I also want to add that WordCamps are made for generating ecosystem around WordPress. So If Developer think it’s only about Development issues then “They also should think about How to Market Product?”

    People like R. Bhavesh, from India shown “How developer can market their product”,

    I do agree with you on this point as WordCamp should be around all WordPress related activities like Development, Marketing, Usability, Improvement, Blogging, Content Generation, Make Money, Freemium model and so on…..

    Bravo post.

  2. It’s good to read..

    Is there any concept or idea which we can develop in WordPress for Mobile Marketers, App Developers, etc.?

    will be pleasure, if we see something new on the above subject!

    Thanks

  3. I wholeheartedly agree with your perspective. I think as long as a talk consists of good content and presentation, we can work out relevance issues. If WordPress drives the majority of internet, a lot of things will be relevant to WordPress users.

    Unfortunately, people in the business of content and presentation (to visitors, to search engines) themselves have been guilty of disregarding meaningful content and interaction in the favour of keyword-stuffing (too much content, on too many slides, with too much information) and pointless self promotion (I’m great and I’ve done great things in life).

    Again, we are all attached to WordPress because it earns us our bread and butter (and even cream 😉 ). So, the purely business related talks are as essential as talks on the functioning of WordPress. However, like I’ve said, if they do not contain useful content and meaningful interaction with the audience, they pointless. Even if a talk is totally related to WordPress and has these same issues, it is as pointless as an unrelated talk.

    I think, as a community, if we focus on that, I’m sure the overall experience of participants will improve, automatically. It won’t matter if they are developers or non-developers.

    • @saurabh,

      If quality of talks or presentation would have been the only issue then I would not have written this post, with that being said, I agree with you that we as a community need to focus on increasing the quality of the talks.

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