I am not a geek.
I tried to be one recently. I signed up and went to the Wordcamp (seminar? workshop? geek fest?) this last weekend. I even recruited about 8 other people to go too.
Wordcamp is the official ‘brand’ for a gathering of Wordpress geeks. But I’m just a huge fan. Just an end- user that knows enough to be dangerous. For those that might be still wondering what is Wordpress - it’s the blog platform that I use for this site and all the other blogs and sites for our clients. It’s a truly kick ass CMS tool (Content Management System). I am getting comfortable with the plugins (did something with Askimet one today to prevent some spam), have read some of the dev blogs to see what is coming up next and look forward to the multimedia upgrades coming hopefully this year. Really, I’m not a geek.
The seminar (workshop? seance?) was a puzzling experience and reminded me of one of the most basic premises in communication, marketing and well, event planning. Know thy audience.
More than half of the folks that attended were developers. In other words, guys that write code. A good chunk were folks still trying to figure out the difference between wordpress.com (the free site - like where I have a photo journal blog with my daughter) and wordpress.org (the site where you pay for your own host - like this one). Both ultimately function very similiarly but have a whole different set of stuff going on behind them.
And then there were folks like me and my posse. We’ve been using Wordpress for just under 2 years, we keep learning and tweaking as we go along.
The first speaker was from the company that developed Wordpress and spoke literally at 56,000 feet. The second speaker was honestly more novice than my daughter (she’s 5). So after deciding the one session that was worthwhile (maybe) wasn’t really worth waiting four hours for - I made the break. It was that the event tried to be everything to everyone - and maybe as a result - didn’t do great things for anyone (I hope I’m wrong).
My hats go off to the organizers for putting forth a big effort nonetheless, and hope that lots of the other attendees had a plentiful day of geek-speak. This fan just went home.
Similar Posts
I was among the 8 recruited for the WordCamp event. I actually DID stay the remainder of the day. The talk about “You Are The Expert” and “Branding Your Blog” were without a doubt the best presentations of the day - inspiring and informative. Although I will say I’m not sure I LEARNED a whole lot that day, I’m always interested in hearing different perspectives and how people present their information.
Overall, I thought that the presentation methods of the various speakers was visually dismal (yes, I’m a graphic designer and visually stimulated).
It seems that the blogging community is great at “making” the engine work but not so good at “showing” how the engine works.
Even in a room of like-minded individuals (developers, coders, writers….) I do have to think in the end, we are ALL visual people in a situation such as a seminar like this. Almost every speaker apologized for slow connection speed or NO connection speed. But beyond that, paragraph after paragraph of 10pt type doesn’t really cut it for presentation purposes. I’d like to suggest screenshots dumped into PPT (as a minimum) to make sure one doesn’t have to combat facility connection speed. Be in control of what happens and don’t let silent pauses dominate your presentation.
True, the product IS the online page. The presentation of it doesn’t merely have to be THAT page - we all know it’s there. And many, like myself, were sitting at my laptop viewing the page from a closer distance. Had the presentation itself been more visually engaging, and not JUST the page - I may have actually had reason to pay more attention to the stage.
I challenge speakers in this category to step beyond - and make it engaging and memorable. I would gladly offer my brain and services to individuals faced with needing to make such a presentation. A song is coming to mind…. “Let’s get visual, visual….”
I am a Mac, and a novice WordPress user.
Ruth,
Thanks for sending this blog post.
I couldn’t agree more about the variety of levels of discussion.
I ended up leaving early too because it just seemed a bit basic. But how would a conference organizer make sure to get to everyone’s level? That would be a really tough job.
It would be awesome to have a small Wordpress MeetUp group in Columbus so we could all progress together and link to one another and just generally “raise all boats”. A more grassroots approach would hypothetically facilitate a smaller feedback loop and hopefully meet everyone’s needs better.
-Brad
Brad - end users are so diverse, it would be interesting to come up with some sort of “user ability” profile wherein you are classified for your specific skill level - and also knowing of what levels are yet to be achieved. One of my biggest problems at this point is I don’t know what I don’t know. We could then facilitate those smaller groups as you suggest. I wonder if Wordpress has considered any type of skill level system…they seem SO incredibly focused on the developer.