Wordcamp Montreal 2010 Review
I'm no expert when it comes to conferences, in fact, Wordcamp Montreal (2010) was the first web conference I've ever attended. But even so, I do have some thoughts on the event, both positive and negative. Before I get started, I should probably make it known that I'm a developer by trade and wanted to attend the conference to improve the way I code my Wordpress themes. I was also really interested to hear how people are dealing with traditional Wordpress shortcomings, like multilingualism.
What Went Right
Firstly, Montreal Wordcamp is a young conference, 2010 was only it's second year running. And all things considered, I think it went fairly well. There were enough people to make it feel like a serious event, but it was still small enough to retain a degree of intimacy. There was some typical conference swag: stickers, buttons, t-shirts, cupcakes, giveaways, pizza, all that good stuff.
The venue itself was a perfect size and in a central location. There was ample space to walk around and mingle and the Wi-Fi was solid throughout the entire event. Things felt like they were organized well, there was never any confusion about what was happening and everyone seemed really friendly and enthusiastic about the cause.
The Bad Bits
At the end of the day, a conference is only as good as its speakers, and to be entirely honest, the speakers at Wordcamp Montreal 2010 were not very good if you were looking for exciting technical speeches. Many of the talks that sounded like they would be very technical were often basic and boring, leaving me feeling like I had wasted time.
What makes this situation even worse is the fact that there were so many programmers attending. At one point during the first day, a speaker asked if there were any developers in the room, and almost the entire room raised their hands. By the second day it seemed like the number of developers (and others) had declined substantially, although this trend could have been related to the previous nights party.
At many points it seemed like speakers were doing presentations for themselves and their personal reputation rather than having any real expertise. One particularly boring talk walked through the process of optimizing images, encoding MP3's, and embedding YouTube videos. All content that was not specific to Wordpress, nor suitable for such a tech savy audience.
In my humble opinion, I felt that most talks were filled with more fluff than substance. Which is really frustrating, because I think we can assume with some certainty that the audience attending a Wordpress conference knows enough about the platform to be uninterested in talks that only walk through the basics.
Moving Forward
So will I attend next year? Absolutely. Despite my relatively sour review, I do see great value and potential in getting together with the Montreal Wordpress community. In fact, I may even try to prepare a talk aimed at theme developers for 2011. After all, Wordpress is all about being open, with each person trying to make things better for the community as a whole.
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Shannon Smith
5:15 PM on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
I'm one of the organizers, and I'm glad you offered your honest opinion on the event. I'm happy that you found things that you liked about the conference, and we definitely want to make next year's conference better.
Our plan with WordCamp (this year at least) was to have 2 streams: 1 for bloggers and one for developers and programers. Ideally, we would have had one talk per stream going on at any given time. And increasing the technical levels of the talks for developers fits in with our plans. But, as you mention, the conference really does depend on the quality and number of the speakers.
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Shannon Smith
5:15 PM on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
(oops, I went over the limit for comment length. Here's the rest. )
Why not propose a talk yourself next time? Or encourage people you know to submit a proposal? We would love to have more and better speakers and the more qualified people who step up to the plate, the more we will include. Who knows... maybe next year, we can add a third room?
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Emerson Lackey
5:53 AM on Friday, September 3rd, 2010
Hey Shannon,
Thanks for the comments. Definitely planning to give a talk next year (as I mention in the review). Might also try and do something exciting, like launch a plugin during the conference.
But yes, overall I had a really good time, and especially enjoyed the talk by Jeremy Clarke. I thought he did a really good job of being technical, without getting too bogged down in the code. Thanks for stopping by :-)
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Jeremy Clarke
7:25 AM on Saturday, September 4th, 2010
Thanks for the review. Fwiw it's impossible to satisfy everyone all the time, and what we found last year was that a lot of Noobs came to WordCamp who barely knew what wp was. Last year we had a lot of complaints that the talks were too technical, and we needed more balance for non-devs.
Really though i didn't say no to any technical talks until the schedule was full this year, so its mostly a matter of having developers propose their talks early. I am a dev and want dev talks so if you give me a chance I will try to make a dev track full of advanced content :)
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Jeremy Clarke
7:27 AM on Saturday, September 4th, 2010
Hopefully the networking part of the conference was a success at least. As an expert i find meeting other pros and chatting to be the most enjoyable part of wordcamps, since it's so hard to actually find a talk with content you don't already know.
P.s. Your comment validation plugin is too aggressive. I don't think my comment was unreasonable but it forced me to split it in two.
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Emerson Lackey
3:37 AM on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
@Jeremy
Out of the entire event I thought your talk was best. Good mix of technical talk without getting too buried in code. Made me think more seriously about widgets and their place in my life.Definitely met some good people. Looking forward to next year. Also, my blog is custom built on Rails - so no comment plugin :-), I'll tweak my comment validation when I move my blog to Rails 3.
