donnacha of WordSkill

Hi Miroslav.

I can understand your dislike of the “WordCamp + Country” form in the context of the US and your country, Canada, but I will explain why I believe that the WordPress Foundation should apply a different rule to the vast majority of other countries in the world.

First, however, I’ll address some of the other points you brought up.

Yes, there are plenty of WordPress users all over the UK and almost none of them want to see WordCamps happen only in expensive London, not even the Londoners, but that is likely to be the unintended consequence of this misguided WordPress Foundation rule.

Any large capital in a relatively compact country has certain draining effects. If you force all WordCamps to be “local”, you give yet another huge advantage to a city as massive, congested and concentrated as London.

You are, naturally enough, looking at it from the perspecitive of attendees – the people who pay to attend the event – and, of course, the most WordPress users are in the most populous cities. I would, however, suggest that, for important practical reasons, it makes more sense to think about it in terms of the availability of sponsors who identify themselves with specific regions. You need the financial support of sponsors early on in order to pay for the venue rental and other fixed costs that must be paid in advance, often long before you can even start selling “early bird” tickets to attendees.

I would argue that you could put on a WordPress event in any city and, if the ticket price is fair, you will sell out long before the event – getting attendees to come is rarely a problem, getting the event off the ground in the first place is. Without sponsors, the event either doesn’t happen or, if it does, the ticket prices will be astronomical.

Unfortunately, in pure advertising terms, it is hard to make the argument that sponsoring a WordCamp gives a company a good return on their advertising dollar, so, they have to be persuaded that there is another, less tangible but still important benefit: that they are supporting a community that they, both as a business and as individuals, are part of.

From that perspective, the number of companies who might feel any sort of obligation to sponsor a WordCamp UK is far greater than the number who will feel the same way about WordCamp Leeds. There is also the important factor the sponsoring any event gives a company certain bragging rights, gives it something to proudly mention on its website and, let’s face it, being of sponsor of WordCamp UK sounds far better than being a sponsor of WordCamp Leeds. I suspect that even companies based in Leeds would feel that way. The overall result of making all WordCamps local is that London will have a wildly disproportionate advantage in securing sponsorship because it is the city with the most businesses locally.

Another very real problem is that high-quality international speakers are reluctant to appear at events that sound too regional. Again, being a featured speaker at WordCamp UK gives them far more bragging rights than WordCamp Leeds. There are some speakers who, in the absence of an actual WordCamp UK, could probably be persuaded to appear at a WordCamp London because it is the capital and, therefore, becomes the de facto main event, regardless of the WordPress Foundation’s intentions.

Technically speaking WordCamp UK can be in any city in the United Kingdom.

No, that is precisely the problem: the event previously known as WordCamp UK can no longer happen, no event can be named WordCamp UK. Under the rule introduced in 2010, each WordCamp must go by the name of the city in which it is held.

Previously, this allowed the event, with all of its cachet as a national event, to rotate around different cities in the UK, with the honor going to whichever city offered the best combination of accessibility, facilities and price – this was never, ever going to be London and even Londoners appreciated being able to get out and see different parts of the UK.

Companies all over the UK, even in London, could be approached to sponsor a WordCamp UK far away and high-quality speakers were happy to fly into cities they had never heard of because the event itself was prestigious.

The WordPress Foundation rule probably made perfect sense when they were sitting in some San Francisco cafe, at the edge of a massive country with strong regional identities and vibrant local tech industries – WordCamp Austin, WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Portland … none of them need the cachet of being a national event and the capital city, Washington D.C., does not overshadow the rest of the country

Another massive country with a non-dominant capital is … Canada! Toronto’s tech scene is entirely distinct from Vancouver’s and your capital, Ottawa, is hardly a threat to either. I would imagine the same applies to the major Australian cities too – do many people even realize that Canberra is the capital?

No, the problem I am addressing arises only in older, geographically smaller countries where the capital has long overshadowed the rest of the country: the UK, Holland, France, Italy, Ireland etc. If their intention was truly to encourage grassroots, regional growth of WordPress, the WordPress Foundation scored an own-goal with this rule. It happened because they were not thinking about unintended consequences and, even after the stringent complaints of the foreign organizers who were affected by their meddling, they did not care enough to take on board the scale of the problem or to notice the effect that it has now, as predicted, had.

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