The local WordPress community in Pune had not seen a WordCamp since February 2019. So organising a WordCamp in 2024, seemed like we were a new community.
That is represented by the fact that in the organising team of eleven, eight of them had no experience organising a WordCamp. Two of them were attending their first WordCamp along with organising it! 😀
Post COVID-19 realities, we found there was a bit of fatigue in the regular WordCamp format. We also found that while WordCamps in Pune were generally well attended, the attendees were not necessarily interacting with the community or even the software as much as we’d hoped.
So at WordCamp Pune, we decided to test out a new format that I can best describe as a “Deconstructed Workshop”.
“Learn by Doing” Format
The format was simple: a group of people sit in a room together around some tables. Three or four facilitators introduce themselves and guide everyone on a certain topic.
Pune’s local community chapter tested this by building a full page with FSE of a website’s homepage. The pros of this format were:
- The facilitator did not feel the stress of preparing how to speak, how to present. They could focus more on the outcome and steps because there were others around.
- Because there was no single speaker, it led to pretty much egoless participation by everyone. To some degree, it also encouraged participants to reach out for help & conversations.
- Among the facilitating team, creating something together led to deeper conversation and interactions.
As we applied for a WordCamp back in June 2023, we wrote up a proposal on what this experiment would look like.
Challenges
Our organising team had changes and were personally challenged. We had one organiser drop out. Our lead organiser had to switch places with another because life happens.
Thankfully, we had a large organising group and could keep sharing responsibilities quite easily.
The cause for most delays was the internal back-and-forth it took to scale up from a one hour meetup to a fill day conference. Like anything new, it was equal parts challenging and enjoyable to solve for.
With the time crunch, we struggled a bit with sponsor outreach. While we did manage to get enough sponsors at the end, we could probably improve on this aspect next year. We could have also started marketing the WordCamp earlier.
Not having speakers and asking facilitators to collaborate with each other was disorienting for some. We managed to solve this thanks to our facilitators embracing the experiment, giving us feedback on improvements and most importantly, writing down the desired outcomes of their activity (which was in itself a great filter for the organising team!)
And it seemed to have worked! We heard from folks—first-time attendees and WordCamp veterans, organisers & facilitators alike—that the WordCamp was enjoyable, engaging, and enlightening.
Sharing below some nice things about WordCamp Pune shared on Twitter/X.
What about next year?
We had a post-WordCamp meetup a few days ago and plan to have the same format the next year with some iterative improvements. Along with that, we want to now move into organising meetup workshops and make them similarly a lot more interactive.
Some of the ideas we discussed were captured nicely in this list by Aditya Jaju in his handy note-taking diary. The last 4 entries are by yours truly and so sorry about the handwriting at the end there.
Vote of Thanks
Firstly, we thank all our sponsors. WordPress.com, GoDaddy, WPBeginner, Woo, BlueHost, rtCamp and CloudJiffy were our Gold sponsors, along with our Silver Sponsors which were Awesome Websites, CyberChimps, WP Legal Pages, Softaculous and LUBUS.
We want to thank all our volunteers and facilitators who helped carry off the day’s events calmly and also managed to pack in loads of fun.
Special thanks to our photography volunteer Lokesh Budhrani. You can view all the photos he took here. Finally, our tickets were sold using the payment gateway account of Inkmyweb.com, who absorbed some of the compliance and tax costs around ticketing.
How to get involved
The best way to get involved is to join our Pune WordPress Meetup group and show up at one of our meetups. You can also ask about hosting or speaking at the meetup once you’ve got a feel for it.
You can also follow us on Twitter/X and Instagram, though we’re most active on the WordPress Pune Slack.
Handy Links
- Initial proposal for WordCamp Pune and its new format
- Pune’s WordPress Meetup Group
- Photos Folder from WCPune
Credits: Thanks to @joelabreo for his inputs on this blogpost.