So many of our events within the community are seen as things we expect people to "just know." Our local WordPress Meetup group, for example, doesn't advertise. Our local WordCamp doesn't advertise. We still receive a fair number of attendees to both, but run into significant issues as we just expect people know what and where we are.

Before a Meetup, I was across the street getting dinner with my wife. The elevator broke down, and a woman took that opportunity to spend 30 minutes berating me for how awful WordPress is as a platform and how I was a horrible person for forcing it on my clients (I was wearing a WP sweatshirt at the time and mistakenly answered the "so what do you do" question). Turns out, she was a WordPress user just frustrated with the WYSIWYG interface. After she calmed down, I explained how to solve her problem and she was a happier person.

It also turns out she works in the same building the WordPress Meetup group meets in and had just run across the street to grab dinner after work. Despite working in the same building, she'd never heard of the Meetup group. She'd also never heard of WordCamp at all (Portland or otherwise), but promised she'd look it up and attend when it was scheduled.

The devs among us (myself included) often look at WordPress and argue for changes that fit just the development community - but WordPress has adamantly held on to the principle that we design for the majority. We design the software for non-technical users who "simply want to be able to write without problems or interruption." This is not the average IRC dev chat attendee, nor is it the average reader of WP news/opinion sites.

If the target attendee of WordCamps (in general, not just SF) is an insider who casually knows the difference between Meetup groups, WordCamps, and WordCamp SF itself, then we've done a great job at branding thus far. But that's not the average person I've seen at WordCamps. There are plenty of insiders, but the vast majority of attendees are WordPress' end users who don't know or care what my opinion is about event names, don't know or care about the difference between .com and .org (until it becomes relevant), who don't know or care who Matt is, and who don't know or care what WordCamp Central has to say about which is or isn't the "official annual conference" of the community.