They say that the third time’s the charm, but I don’t know if I would apply that to the third WordCamp conference in San Francisco that took place today. While it may partially have been that maybe I’ve gotten a little bit used to it, now that I’ve been there a few times, a lot of changes happened this year that I didn’t really think were that much for the better. And so my analysis and recap of this year’s WordPress event begins…

Following the evolution of WordCamp has been quite interesting. The very first WordCamp was really a quickly put-together BarCamp style meet-up that was organized out of Automattic’s first real life meetup. It was somewhat quickly announced less than a month ahead of time, and was really organized from somewhat of a grassroots level. Prospective attendees were asked to suggest the sessions that they wanted to hear, and they were even solicited to help participate and present each of the sessions. Even then, the sessions were quite interactive, as authors of widgets, plugins, and themes; podcasters and bloggers; and people who were just discovering this stuff for the first time all got a chance to come together and share thoughts and ideas with each other. There was a wiki available for people to continue the discussion and exchange of ideas. Overall, it was an exciting event because it was a truly social event that really sparked a lot of energy between the attendees.

WordCamp 2007 was done somewhat differently than the previous year’s WordCamp was. It was less of a BarCamp and more of a traditional-style conference. It actually cost money to attend, unlike the previous year, it spanned two days instead of one, it only had one presentation at a time, and it was not a community-oriented schedule, but was instead completely put together by Automattic and consisted of more popular, more well-known speakers. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the conference overall, because although a few of the speakers were a little bit dull, most of the sessions were on interesting subjects that bloggers could really care about. Presentations such as an interactive, in-depth discussion on blogs vs. journalism, connecting your content with your readers, monetizing your blog, looking at the usability of WordPress (which was also an early preview at the new redesign coming in WP 2.5), hearing from the WordPress developers, and more really continued to make the event feel like a social event.

This year’s 2008 WordCamp, in comparison, did not feel like it was up to the par set by the prior two. This year, WordCamp was held in a much larger location in two separate rooms that were upstairs and downstairs and were far enough apart to feel like they were completely separate events. The conferences were divided into a “User Track,” held upstairs, and a “Developer Track,” held downstairs. However, unlike the WordCamps of 2006 and 2007, this year’s sessions were much, much shorter. Whereas WordCamp originally had hour-long sessions, this year’s sessions were only half an hour long in the morning and twenty minutes long in the afternoon, with the exception of Matt’s keynote presentation.

The sessions also had much less depth to them, which could partially be because of the limited amount of time. The downstairs Developer Track was one that I hardly touched–I mean, last year’s developer-centric sessions were things like “HyperDB and High Performance WordPress,” “Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems,” and “Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing”–somewhat developer-centric but still accessible to the average Joe. This year’s developer sessions included “DiSo, OAuth, and more,” “Quercus PHP in Java,” “Nginx for Fun and Profit,” “Intro to jQuery,” “WordPress APIs–iPhone and Beyond!” and “Color Theory and the Making of Monotone,” among a few others. I’m sure that was interesting to a number of attendees, but it sure has a much more limited appeal than the prior two WordCamps.
The user sessions, too, had less depth than past years, and I really think that it’s because in prior years, there have been more sessions on how to actually make a successful blog. While I mean absolutely no offense to the people who presented these, I feel that many people are less interested in “The Secret of Virality,” “WordPress & Microformats: Past, Present, Future,” “Switching to WordPress Painlessly” (most of us have already switched and endured the pain), and “260 Ways to Break WordPress,” but would be more interested in sessions like “Blog Promotion and Writing a Compelling Blog,” “Blog Monetization,” “Getting Involved with WordPress,” and “Kicking Ass Content Connections,” which were sessions presented in 2006 and 2007. In short, I feel that the presentations dealt too much with some of the superficial things within WordPress, and didn’t take the time to offer any presentations of the bigger picture of having a successful blog. After all, we are all bloggers, and so we all have the same goal.

But overall, what I felt was lacking the most at this WordCamp was the social aspect. At a BarCamp, the social aspect and the interaction aspect is the key part of making it a success, and it felt like this was really lacking at this year’s WordCamp. The attendees and the community at large was not involved in organizing the schedule–heck, the schedule wasn’t even announced until the morning of and still has not been posted on the website despite the fact that WordCamp ended a full day ago. The schedule offered no time for the attendees to be social and to get to know each other, and the venue was too darned big for much effective socializing to take place. The presentation times were so short that no one had the opportunity to ask questions at all in any of the sessions that I attended, particularly when the short amount of time between sessions caused the schedule to inevitably fall way behind.

One other big difference has occurred since 2007. Between WordCamp 2006 and WordCamp 2007, there were no other WordCamp meetups of any kind taking place. Between WordCamp 2007 and WordCamp 2008, however, eleven other WordCamps took place in other locations around the country and around the world, and there are fourteen more scheduled to take place before the end of 2008, according to WordCamp Central. Unlike the WordCamp that has taken place in San Francisco for the past three years now, those other WordCamps were started up by individuals or small groups of individuals by themselves, with only minimal support from the guys at Automattic, and so those have mostly been put on in the same BarCamp style that inspired the original WordCamp 2006. The San Francisco WordCamp, in turn, has evolved into more of a “premier” WordPress annual event that attracts people from across the country (in addition to local Bay Area folks) and that is tightly managed and organized by Automattic, than an open conference that encourages the participation and real-life social networking of its attendees.

It has been a great experience to have been lucky enough to attend WordCamp over the past three years, but I hope that when WordCamp takes place here next year, Automattic can make it a more open, slower-paced event that can allow for much more community involvement and interaction, and less about sessions, sessions, sessions.

P.S. One more thing: It would also be great if next year’s WordCamp was a little bit earlier than two days before school starts, particularly since for all I know, I might be going out of the state for school next year! Perhaps in late July or early August, instead?

Tags: 2008, Automattic, BarCAmp, Blogging, conference, event, rant, San Francisco, WordCamp, WordPress