WordCamp UK 2010
Wow. It doesn’t seem a year since I was typing up a post about last year’s WordCamp…
This year, WordCamp UK was held in Manchester, a little bit closer to home than Cardiff! Held at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, there were three main tracks (and a fourth communal area) and the same great variety of attendees and talks.
One of my favourite sessions of the weekend was How WordPress Themes Have Changed The World by Michael Kimb Jones. My main port of call in WordPress is theme development, so I was quite interested to see other people’s take on it all, and especially where the GPL themes market is heading to. Similarly, I found Jonny Allbut’s talk on WordPress Theme Frameworks and Template Tricks interesting, and I’m very excited about the beta of the Wonderflux theme framework this week. There were many other great sessions too – particularly the sessions by Simon Wheatley and Mike Little on their latest projects.
On Saturday afternoon I helped Jonny out with the Site doctors: Let the experts help you! session along with Mike Rawlings and John Reid. That was an interesting session and I hope the people who asked us for advice found it useful. (Also, to the guy who wanted the ‘Uncategorized’ category to be changed automatically, I wrote this quickly to add to your theme/plugin).
However, I felt that this year there was a certainly different atmosphere for WordCamp. Last year, it felt a lot more community-oriented, whereas this year it felt slightly less-so, and more enterprise-oriented. This is probably for a number of reasons. Perhaps the same-level table seating arrangement in Cardiff created more of a community feel, and maybe there was more time for chatting between sessions, something that has been entirely dependent on how much of the hour a session used up. And perhaps there were more attendees who were more from an enterprise background. I have to say that this didn’t detract from the great weekend, merely an observation of what has changed since last year. Simon Dickson picked up on this a bit during his session, and referred to the difference between the first WordCamp and Cardiff being similar to this.
Finally, and I’m reluctant to comment on this, there was the heated debate about the future of WordCamp UK. It was a shame that this was only brought up at the end – it left quite a sour taste after such a good weekend. Jane Wells representing Automattic dropped the line during the feedback session that calling the event ‘WordCamp UK‘ was (in her words) “not acceptable”. Needless to say that this didn’t go down well.
I don’t think it is right for Automattic to assert their ethical policies and bureaucracy over what was a community-started event. It was organised entirely by the community – or to be more specific, the fantastic Tony Scott and Chi-Chi Ekweozor – and, after running without hindrance for three years, has recently become a registered organisation. For a company which does not even fund or help organise the event, what right do they have to dictate what we should and shouldn’t do? It feels in a way like a betrayal.
This is my sole objection at present to what was discussed – at the moment I am happy to leave the decisions about the future of WordCamp to the organisers and the Core Group. I just find it irresponsible of Matt/Automattic to effectively “change the rules” late in the game – rules which they don’t have much of a right to enforce. Yes, we could do what Matt loves to say and “vote with our feet” or something to that effect, but what does that do? Even if we were to start something like OpenCamp – which attracted some criticism on the mailing list today – we would just get the Thesis treatment from Matt and inherently the WordPress community.
It’s saddening that this controversy shrouds what was a really good, well-organised event. Once again, I met a lot of new and interesting people, but it also gave me the chance to catch up again with the fantastic people I met last year and have kept in contact with since. Whatever happens between now and the next WordCamp event in the UK, I’m sure the next time will be another good show.