Who attended WordCamp Pune

Age and Gender

It was, as usual, a male dominated event with more than 80% attendees being men. However, the 20% is a great improvement in the state of the community as other WordCamp organisers may agree.

This is not a fair representation of the actual community where there are way more women involved. It is not 50-50 but it sure should be more than 35-40%. Maybe, WordCamp Mumbai 2016 or WordCamp Pune 2016 will manage to fix this!

The maximum number of attendees were between 21 to 30 years old, about 80% of the total. This could mean multiple things:

• That the seniors (advanced users?) stayed away from the WordCamp because they weren’t convinced enough.
• That the community itself is made up of more young people.

Again we feel this is not even close to the real world data and it should have been at least 70-30 instead of the current 80-20 distribution.

Role and Level of Expertise

WordCamp Pune was a developer dominated event with half of the attendees identifying themselves as developers. This correlates with the real world fact that Pune is dominated by the IT industry and hence such developer turnout was expected.

However, in our conversations with potential speakers and facilitators, we realised that for some reason, WordCamps have begun to be identified as developer conferences. We worked hard to dispel such myths and did have almost equal number of technical and non-technical sessions, but that didn’t work very well for us this time.

Hopefully, we have at least established the fact that the community as well as the WordCamp is for bloggers and other users, as well. In the next WordCamp Pune (or even WordCamp Mumbai 2016), we should get a more accurate representation of the community.

With 91 Beginners across roles, 179 Intermediate users and 80 Advanced users, people who don’t consider themselves experts, formed 77% of the attendees. Only about 33% consider themselves advanced users and you can count the speakers, sponsor representatives and organisers here (about 60). This leaves us with about 5% advanced attendees that were always in the audience.

This validates our focus on beginner and intermediate users, as far as the content was concerned. This probably tells us to continue this focus onto other WordCamps including the next one in Pune.

Why not 500, why only 350?

We had given free or heavily discounted tickets to about 150 students (of Modern College and Swa-roop Wardhinee) that are not included because it completely skews the data and isn’t a fair representation of the active WordPress community.

Many of them displayed other reasons to attend the event than a curiousity or love for WordPress. Instead of trying to analyse each of them (because many of them did participate in the community and discussions, actively) to separate the wheat from the chaff, we left this data out.

You can see from the data above that this would have skewed the data on gender, age and level of expertise. Even the user role would’ve been affected because almost all of these are students of Engineering or Computer Science.