tl;dr: WordCamp Pune is a one-day event, geared towards students & professionals who are new to WordPress. Sessions will exclusively be in the form of hands-on workshops with tangible take-aways for all participants.
WordCamps usually follow a set pattern. They typically have several sessions with speakers addressing the audience over the course of a day, sometimes two or three tracks.
While there is nothing wrong with this format, we found that about 70% of the attendees in Pune were not finding useful ways to interact with WordPress after the event.
Why?
It is all demographics. India is a young country, with the average age of attendees around 25. Often, WordCamp attendees are beginners with WordPress.
Conference-type inputs, while in-depth and informative, can leave beginners without a specific way to apply what they’ve learnt. From workshops during past WordCamps and local meetups, we’ve seen this demographic benefit the most from high quality, hands-on sessions around relevant topics.
How WCPune 2024 will be different
With the why out of the way, let’s dive into the how.
WCPune 2024 is a lean event. Practically, this means that we don’t have an after party, any significant expenses related to swag, or anything other than the workshops, contributor’s booth & WordPress Happiness Bar happening during the WordCamp.
NO conference-style presentations (ie., speakers on a stage), panel discussions or success stories. All of these will be slotted into our Meetups going forward. Rather, at WordCamp Pune 2024, all sessions will exclusively be hands-on workshops. The idea is for participants to spend their day learning-by-doing.
To ensure the best use of everyone’s time, we’re creating lesson plan-type outlines for each session, with clear & tangible take-away for participants.
We’re here to help!
Conferences and hands-on events can be daunting. Here are a few things we’re doing to address this:
- You’re not going to learn alone: We’ve assembled a friendly set of facilitators who will be present through each session to help you if you’re stuck or need more information.
- The session outcomes will be published over the next weeks, including speakers, tangible outcomes and any prerequisites for participants. If it will help you feel more prepared, you can choose to read up in advance; though this is not an expectation at all.
- Workshop prerequisites are designed to be minimal, with participants only requiring a laptop to fully participate.
We’re super excited to run this event and see how the community receives it. We hope you will join us and help us spread the word! 📢
Join us as a sponsor or as a attendee. Tickets are open.
Thanks to @adityakane for his review & input with this post.