Summing up…

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Our September 23rd event concluded 12 days ago, and after a break, it’s time now for a wrap up post about WordCamp Colombo 2017.

We are still gathering attendee feedback and have just finished balancing the budget. We will be publishing the budget details soon.

Here are the final statistics on attendance:

  • 205 tickets were either sold or handed out (including tickets for photographers, videographers and sponsors)
    • 123 were regular tickets
    • 66 were student tickets
    • 3 bought micro sponsorship tickets
  • 184 persons attended the event
  • 7 organizers worked together for 6 months to plan and prepare
  • 17 volunteers worked as a team during the event, and for two weeks prior

We had a total of 11 speakers, with:

  • 6 long talks,
  • 4 lightning talks
  • 1 panel discussion, and
  • The keynote speech, by Takayuki Miyoshi, developer of Contact Form 7

Out of the 11 speakers, 6 were from Sri Lanka, and 5 flew in from these countries:

  • United States
  • South Africa
  • India
  • Bangladesh
  • Japan

That makes for 54% local speakers.

A big Thank You! to all participants, sponsors, speakers, organizers and volunteers for making this event a celebration to be remembered!

The immediate feedback we received about our sessions, our punctuality, lunch, snacks and after party was very positive, but the organizers have identified imperfections and begun working on them.

As for statistics, we must remind ourselves of something important. Numbers are only a cursory indication of the response. The only factor that defines a good WordCamp is the quality of interaction that takes place during Q & A sessions, at lunch, at tea, at the after party and on Twitter. At the moment, we do not have a panel of judges dedicated to assess this. In fact, we participants are the judges ourselves!

Our immediate priority after WordCamp Colombo 2017 is to capitalize on the positive buzz and carry on building our community through a bottom up approach. This implies a lot of new and interesting meetups, and we want to bring more members on board.

Do join our meetup group to be part of the growth. If you are new to WordPress, you will discover a lot of knowledge and establish new friendships that could last a lifetime. If you are already knowledgeable, you could consider helping out and experience the joy of giving and sharing.

Goodbye for now, and hope to see you all again in upcoming meetups, and some day in 2018 for a newer and more exciting edition of WordCamp Colombo!

 

2 thoughts on “Summing up…”

  1. This is a nice summing up post. It is nice to see the transparency and dialogue that the community in Colombo seems to want to engage with itself.

    Some of these numbers are pretty similar to other WordCamps in South Asia.
    I was also curious about gender ratio at Colombo? Did you collected gender ratio statistics?

  2. Thank you, Aditya, and we hope you can visit Colombo to add value to our meetup group and future WordCamps.

    We had one woman speaker, Karen Arnold, from among the 11. We haven’t collected statistics on gender ratios, but our observation was that were more women attendees than most technology meetups in Sri Lanka.

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