WordCamp Salt Lake City is coming up in short order, and we need you to help us with the most important part of all: Finding our speakers!
Look, I get it. You don’t have any experience speaking, you aren’t a hot-shot developer, or you feel like you don’t have anything to offer the WordPress community. You’re wrong. If you are reading, and you are thinking of attending WordCamp Salt Lake City (or any WordCamp), that means you are a WordPress user — and more involved than your average WordPress user, even, because you are engaged in the community. And if you are a WordPress user, you have a story. Maybe you used WordPress to start a podcast, maybe you’re using WordPress to power your e-commerce site, maybe you’re a musician or an artist that sells digital copies of your work on your website, or maybe you use WordPress.com to communicate with a network of like-minded readers and bloggers. Whatever your story is, we want to hear it. That’s what WordCamps are about.
Last year, we conducted a poll to find out what folks in the WordPress community found most important about WordCamps, ranking everything from what they value in presentations to what is the most important factor in making a WordCamp worthwhile.
Here are a few things we learned.
- The vast majority of you–80%–have been to a WordCamp before, and 64% of responders have been to WCSLC in the past.
- Nearly 50% of responders were developers, with front-end developers taking the lead with 27%.
- 25% of responders worked for a WordPress agency, with 20% following as freelancers.
- Several of you have a major fear of public speaking, and when asked what would make speaking more appealing to you, y’all started clowning around with answers like, “Probably drugs,” “A pill to cure stage fright,” and, “Desire on my part.”
When it comes to presentation topics, you tend to prefer…
- Heavy, developer-centric topics (WP API, JavaScript, WordPress core, plugin development, etc.)
- Designer-centric topics (responsive design, theme development, user interface design, etc.)
- Business-centric topics (selling physical/digital products with WordPress, how to use WordPress for business owners, etc.)
- User-centric topics (SEO, cool plugins to use, podcasting, how to customize the dashboard, etc.)
That pretty much covers everything!
When picking presentations to attend, the top three most important factors you identified are…
- That the presentation addresses something you haven’t heard of or learned yet.
- That the presentation is technically advanced.
- That the presentation is unique/unusual for WordCamps.
The single most important thing to a successful WordCamp?
According to the small sample of folks who participated in our poll, one thing reigns above all else:
-
A fantastic speaker lineup
Why am I telling you all of this?
Because maybe, just maybe, this will give you an idea of what kind of presentations our particular crowd is looking for–although we’re a small WordCamp, so we’d love to see what you have in mind no matter what!
Please join us and share your WordPress knowledge at WCSLC!
Please fill out the following form with details on who you are and your proposed presentation. If you’d like to propose multiple topics, please submit the form multiple times, once for each topic. We will be closing speaker applications August 13th July 16th, 2017, so get on it!
WordCamp SLC will take place on September 23.
The call for speakers is now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted a talk.
Don’t be shy! Dump that imposter syndrome and come teach us something incredible.
Can’t stand public speaking but would still like to help? We’re seeking volunteers to help us re-design our site and with other odds and ends. Any designers wanna be a part of the WCSLC team? Contact us! We’d love to hear from you.
Also, if you know someone else who’d make a great speaker or a topic you’d like to learn about we want to hear from you, too!
