Putting speaker lists together by „quotas“ doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t care about the gender of a speaker, the most important thing is the content of the presentation and how it is presented.

Somehow there seems to have been a shift in focus in the WordPress universe in recent years, at least that’s my impression. It often seems to me that the content of a talk is less important, but the gender or other characteristic of the speaker obviously has priority number one. Doesn’t make sense to me.

In the early years of the WordCamps, I visited the first one in 2008, then in Hamburg, Germany, there was a completely different focus: it was about authentic, interesting content, about real discussions, shop talk. There was an atmosphere of optimism, it was a different spirit. In my eyes it was not really less professional. Often the opposite, the quality of the presentations and the depth of the discussions were better than today in my opinion – of course not always, but quite often.

Nowadays, the talks on WordCamps almost don’t appeal to me anymore. One of many reasons why I don’t visit WordCamps anymore. I saw the WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin, Germany, as an exception for me (after 4 years completely without WordCamps): meeting people, having conversations. I visited 3 Sessions/Talks. To be honest, I could have saved myself that. Gain of knowledge equal zero. Of course they were all excellent speakers super personalities. But the talks were so perfect, so sterile, and far too general. No corners, no edges, the spirit was missing. Strangely enough, all the people I met with felt the same: hardly anyone was really interested in the talks. A real pity – especially for the speakers, because they are very involved, and the organizers have a lot of work to do, e.g. with all the quotas, rules, etc..

Maybe it needs again a “less is more”? Maybe a bit more of the focus, spirit and spirit of the early years of WordCamps, BarCamps and Tech-Conferences?