It has become a WCEU tradition to share speaker submission statistics as well as insights into the selection process.
Community input and direct outreach
Our goal for WCEU 2018 is to improve and innovate on the event format, so we decided to start off with conducting and gathering data from a variety of research. We organize this event for you and everyone in the community.
We worked through the feedback form from WCEU 2017 attendees, which included a suggestion field for speakers you’d like to see on the WCEU stage. We worked through every suggestion and then reached out to a number of people to apply to speak at WCEU. For a select few, we offered them a spot directly.
We also decided to do a community survey to gain insight into how we can improve the experience at WordCamp Europe for the community specifically when it comes to the sessions we offer. 142 members of the community participated in our community survey – we used their input to set our priorities. Based on the results, we made decisions such as prioritizing advanced development topics.
Finally, we opened the call for speakers and received 374 applications!
Speaker applications: the raw data
This is a breakdown of the 374 applications that we received.
Per category:
- Business: 92
- Community: 23
- Content: 17
- Design: 16
- Developer: 153
Per session type:
- Lightning talks: 61
- Long talks: 255
- Workshop (90 min): 33
- Workshop (3 hrs): 25
In total, 216 different people submitted a talk (so an average of 1.7 submissions per person).
To determine gender, we took the scientific approach of looking at the speaker’s name and location, then guessing as we didn’t have asked applicants to specify gender. We understand this approach is not the best as we’re making assumptions based on our own perceptions, rather than applicants’ personal preferences. We’ve chosen to share this data to give insight into the applications, realizing that it may not be completely accurate.
We received submissions from 164 male and 51 female applicants.
We received applications from six continents, with the majority coming from Europe:
And from 40 different countries:
Speaker selection process
We narrowed down the 374 applications to the following:
- 23 full-length talks
- 9 lightning talks
- 8 3-hour workshops
- 8 90-minute workshops
- 3 60-minute workshops
The first step was that our Blind Voting Committee went through and voted on all of the sessions in their area of expertise. They were only able to see session data, as we had hidden the speaker-specific data.
From there, the content team reviewed all applications for the following:
- Quality
- Experience
- Location
- Session interest for WCEU audience
Once we were looking at the very best applications, we needed to narrow it down even further. We tackled questions such as “if there are multiple applications for the same subject, which one is the best for WCEU?” and “if this speaker has submitted multiple awesome applications, which one should we choose?”
We reached out to speakers to confirm availability, then puzzled the different sessions into the schedule. At this point, we also chose backup sessions and reached out to those speakers.
Understandably, some people who weren’t selected did reach out for more insight – we did our best to answer every single one of those questions. We’re all here to learn from each other.
Note: we’ve published a post on how to write winning speaker applications to help you make your application even better!
Selected speakers data
These numbers aren’t including the speakers who agreed to be backup speakers. This helps make a clearer overview of numbers.
In the final selection of 65 people, we have 47 male and 18 female speaker and workshop hosts:
As WordCamp Europe is one of the big regional WordCamps, we wanted to make sure that we have a strong representation of regional speakers: of the 65 speakers, 34 (57.6%) are from Europe.
And finally, a breakdown per country:
Update: there are a few discrepancies between the applications and selected speakers, for example that no-one applied from Algeria, but we do have one speaker from Algeria. This is due to workshop co-hosts who are counted as speakers but weren’t counted in the original applications.
Don’t miss out 🎉
We’re very proud of the lineup of our speakers and sessions at WCEU 2018 this year and we hope you can join us for this great event! But with only a handful of WordCamp Europe tickets left, grab yours while you can!
Thanks so much for collating and publishing these statistics. They offer some interesting insights; and pose some interesting questions.
For a European community event, I believe it’s right that the majority of speakers are European. Of course we should always welcome those travelling from afar, especially when they bring lessons and experience from other communities. But I wonder if 60% is enough to give the event a truly distinctive and representative European identity.
Of those from outside Europe, 33% are North American – and so (presumably) are first-language English speakers. I worry that this discourages potential European speakers who feel their English ability isn’t up to that same high standard. I think we should be worried that we have so few speakers from places like France (zero) and Spain (one) with large, vibrant WordPress communities and insightful speakers.
It’s also disappointing that we have nobody from our host country, Serbia.
Perhaps location should be considered before any blind review stage, to ensure a greater European focus: after all, local focus is an explicit principle of WordCamps. Or perhaps we should be more proactive in inviting speakers from specific European places, or who have been well received at smaller European events – supporting them, linguistically and financially, if necessary.
Thanks, Simon – these are interesting questions and challenges indeed. And they’re certainly not new – they’re questions we ask ourselves every year. One of the answers that I really appreciated when I joined the team a few years back was a reminder that while, yes, our event (and so our speakers) are a representation of the European community, so is our event an opportunity for our European community to gain exposure to the larger, global WordPress community. For many who cannot travel abroad to meet core contributors or see Matt, for example, WCEU is also the opportunity to bring those folks to them. This isn’t to say that I don’t agree with the points your raise, but I think it’s an important perspective to keep in mind too. See you soon in Belgrade!