Category: Updates
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.
Goodbye and thank you for the fish
WordCamp Pune 2015 is officially over. Thank you everyone for your awesome support and kind words. WordPress Pune is not over, though.
We’ll be sharing a lot of photos and videos as they get ready. We’ll also be sharing a lot of statistics and data that we collected and yes we’ll share our experiences. Do let us know if you’ve written or posted anything about WordCamp Pune 2015. We’d love to see those and feature some on this website. Do tag your posts #WCPune on social media for us to find your shares.
Over to WordCamp Mumbai 2016, the next WordCamp in India.
Ticket sales and a speaker swap
This is really surprising. Considering the number of people who had contacted us for cancellation, we were expecting more tickets. However, we are going through mixed emotions to tell you that there’s been only one cancellation among the attendees. The cancelled tickets are struck through (like this) on the attendees page.
Another cancellation has been by our speaker Joe Guillmette whose session will be replaced by a session on WP Design Patterns by Karthik Magapu.
So, as of now, we have nothing but two tickets to release. If there are any more cancellations during the day, we’ll let you know right here.
Best of luck! See you at the WordCamp.
What to do if you didn’t get a WordCamp Pune ticket
You don’t need a ticket for everything
Even if you don’t have a ticket, you can still come and meet the community at the following events. Entry is free and open to everyone! So, come and experience the awesome feeling of being part of a vibrant community!
Beginners Workshop
http://www.meetup.com/Pune-WordPress-Knowledge-Exchange/events/223896604/
Buildathon
http://www.meetup.com/Pune-WordPress-Knowledge-Exchange/events/223896584/
After-Party
More tickets, new plan
4th September, now: If you wish to cancel your ticket, visit http://ticket.wordcamp.wppune.org/cancel/.
5th September, 10 am: All available tickets go on sale. There is no guaranteed count, it may just be a few, even just one or two. The number of available tickets will also be announced at this time. We’ll continue allowing cancellations without refund, at this time.
5th September, 11:59 pm: Deadline for any cancellation or sale. We are okay if we end up having less than 500 at this point, but there are not going to be more than 500 tickets.
6th September , 12:00 am: No more ticket sales, no spot sales. We strongly advise that you don’t arrive at the venue without a ticket. We won’t accept anyone without a ticket. To repeat, there will never be more than 500 tickets under any circumstances.
If you have a ticket that you aren’t likely to use, please help out the other members of the community get a ticket by cancelling it. We’ll really appreciate the gesture.
If you are looking for a ticket, 5th September, 10 am is the time to be online and get the tickets.
More tickets
We got sold out!
However, since then we have been flooded with emails, calls, tweets, comments, posts all asking for that one elusive WordCamp Pune tickets.
So, we have some good news and we have some not so good news.
Not more than 500
There are absolutely no extra tickets. We really wish to focus on organising the event and even if you are our best friends, we cannot create a new ticket, there is no scope of discussion here.
Just a few days from the event, we really need to focus on making everyone’s WordCamp experience, the best possible. We cannot spend time now replying to all these emails or talking to you on the phone.
Please bear with us. This is the first time this total team is organising an event.
More tickets
Having said that, we have also been contacted by some participants that they’ll not be able to make it to the WordCamp and would rather cancel their tickets to let someone else attend.
So, we are going to allow cancellations asap. All cancellations will be without refund (because we simply don’t have the time to process all that). We are working on it and all participants will soon receive an email with a secure link to cancel their tickets.
All cancelled tickets will be added to the available pool. We don’t want you to spend time refreshing the page just to see if a ticket is available. That’s why we have a plan!
The timeline
4th September, before 10 am: All cancellation links will be emailed.
5th September, 10 am: All available tickets go on sale. There is no guaranteed count, it may just be a few, even just one or two.
5th September, 11:59 pm: Deadline for any cancellation or sale. We are okay if we end up having less than 500 at this point, but there are not going to be more than 500 tickets.
6th September , 12:00 am: No more ticket sales, no spot sales. We strongly advise that you don’t arrive at the venue without a ticket. We won’t accept anyone without a ticket. To repeat, there will never be more than 500 tickets under any circumstances.
If you have a ticket that you aren’t likely to use, please help out the other members of the community get a ticket by cancelling it. We’ll really appreciate the gesture.
If you are looking for a ticket, 5th September, 10 am is the time to be online and get the tickets.
Image Credits:
Raffel Tickets by Alyson Hurt licensed under CC BY 2.0
Bring your own bag to WordCamp Pune, but make sure it’s empty
Sipper
We have already mentioned the cool reusable sippers from Bluehost.
T-shirt
How about a cool t-shirt made of 100% combed cotton, 180gsm, sourced from the best manufacturers in the knitwear capital of India? Some of the world’s largest retailers including C&A, Switcher SA, Walmart, Primark, Oviesse, Switcher, Polo Ralph Lauren, Diesel, Tommy Hilfiger, M&S, FILA, H&M, Reebok import textiles and clothing from Tirupur. This ensured great quality at a fraction of the market cost.
The momento
Next on the list is this pretty little mug. Every time you’ll look at this minimal design, it’ll remind you of WordCamp Pune without saying much! We just let the logo be and even took out the Pune WordCamp 2015 text to make sure it becomes more about your experience with the Pune community as a whole, not just this WordCamp.
More Swag
There’s a lot of awesome swag that you a lucky few can get at the sponsors’ stalls. We have spied some aweome things like t-shirts, playing cards, cute little diaries, keychains, stickers, tattoo sleeves, more t-shirts and other stuff in the sponsors’ swag list. Here’s a secret preview of just one of them. Shh…
Bring your own bag
The only thing we aren’t providing is a bag. So make sure you bring an empty bag to stuff with all these goodies! However, if you want, eCoexist will be selling eco-friendly cloth bags that empower a section of underprivileged women and families (including families of farmers that lose their crops to the drought) through their initiative.
Maybe you could support the cause by buying a beautiful bag from them!
Well, the wait is almost over. With just 3 days left, we’re literally going to see you soon!
WordCamp Pune for the community!
Our sponsors, notably JetPack, WP All Import, ZNetLive, SaniSoft and BlogBrandz have asked us to donate all their free tickets to someone who deserved and could use it better. Others have given away at least some of their tickets and some haven’t claimed them yet. These would also go in the charity pool.
In addition, speakers like Mahangu, Andy, Jeremy and Jitesh have given away their tickets, choosing to buy one instead. In total, we have about 25 tickets. We decided to add another 25 to it and give away 50 free tickets to youth who come from economically disadvantaged families.
We got in touch with ‘Swa’–Roop Wardhinee which is one of the leading non-governmental, non-profit organisations working with underprivileged college students, children and women and help them with their education, self-help and skills and vocation based training.
We’re glad to announce that thanks to our sponsors for funding us well and everyone who gave away their tickets so that students from ‘Swa’–Roop Wardhini can get introduced to the world of Blogging and Open Source in general and WordPress, specifically. It could have been just a little difficult for them to spend the ticket cost of WordCamp Pune 2015!
The next time, we’ll make this 10% share larger than it is. Promise!
Drinking Responsibly, the most precious drink on earth
At an event like this, hundreds of people drink water from disposable plastic bottles or plastic/ paper tumblers raising the environmental cost of such a simple social event.
Which is why, at WordCamp Pune, we have tried to do away with it without losing any practical convenience.
The culture of reuse
We have procured packaged drinking water in large reusable containers, that’ll be placed all over the venue along with reusable dispensers.
The containers go back to the bottling plant where they are sterilised and water is refilled for distribution. This means we do away with small prepackaged water bottles that could end up anywhere since we don’t have enough control on that.
If each of us has a bottle that they can refill whenever they want to, we do away with the plastic/ paper tumblers.
Courtesy of our WordCamp Superb Bluehost, we’ll each have a re-usable metal sipper/bottle that’s about 500ml in capacity. Metallic with plastic cap and straw, we feel these are quite good looking and handy. Now, we’ll be able to reuse almost everything and produce almost zero garbage from the act of drinking water.
It’s also swag!
Here, have a look. And, thanks Bluehost!