@Jane Wells - Thanks for taking the time to respond and letting us know what the official line is.

My comments above were responding to a post which discusses this new WordUp event brand. It was entirely relevant, appropriate and valid of me to speculate on why the organizers of upcoming WordPress events in the UK, such as Edinburgh and Brighton, are choosing to forgo the support of the WordPress Foundation and the cachet of the WordCamp brand.

As @Tony Scott reminds us, the issue of naming was raised by you at the WordCamp he ran in July last year and you must surely remember the reaction of many members of the British WordPress community. I drew upon my memory of that controversy to inform my speculation.

If that entire controversy was, in fact, based upon a misinterpretation of what you said, a lot of people in the UK certainly aren't aware of any clarification - in going over the many posts written at the time, I did not notice anyone from Automattic popping up to reveal that it was all a misunderstanding.

Your explanation of the naming rule makes sense and sounds fair but, for whatever reason, it does not appear to have filtered through to many people directly involved in organizing events. As I noted, the idea of running a WordCamp Scotland (which, like many such plans, may never have come to fruition anyway) was dropped specifically because of the impression that this rule would be forced upon us.

That’s not true at all. Most of the events in planning for 2012 are still in the “Planned WordCamps” column on the schedule page because they haven’t nailed down dates/venue yet. If you had looked there before commenting, you’d see that Azerbaijan, Norway, and Croatia are all using their country name.

Please don't suggest that I should be aware of every branch and twig of WordCamp documentation before I am entitled to comment. I believe I was fairly thorough in examining the page that Scribu linked to, on which all 2012 WordCamps - at all stages of planning - use city name rather than country, including Baku, Oslo and Zagreb.

You say there is some schedule page I should have been aware of but that is on an entirely different site from the WordPress.org one that Scribu linked to and which looks pretty authoritative to me.

I am just making comments, not writing the editorial for the Wall Street Journal, my point was that Scribu's link did not refute and, in fact, supported my speculation. If, instead, he had linked to the schedule page, sure, my conclusion would have been different, just as I now accept the definitive truth from the horse's mouth.

For what it's worth, it is not a bad thing that this discussion has taken place; a lot grumbling has stemmed from apparent misunderstandings of the WordPress Foundation's role and attitude, a lot of good people have been rubbed up the wrong way and, even if they are mistaken, it should be treated as real issue.