WordCamps in 2012

Another year gone by, and my how the WordCamp program has grown! As you will see below, a total of 67 WordCamps were organized this year by volunteers in communities all over the world. The fairly even split between WordCamps inside the US and outside the US has stayed about the same, and we still average about 250 attendees per event. There were 22 WordCamps in cities or countries that had never had a WordCamp before.

This year, we also expanded the video camera kit program, which ships video camera equipment from WordCamp to WordCamp, to reduce the cost of recording WordCamp sessions. We now have 8 kits in the US, 3 kits in Canada, and 2 kits in Europe. Related: 445 WordCamp videos were posted to WordPress.tv in 2012, almost double the number from 2011. That’s a huge amount of free WordPress content available to anyone, hurray!

WordCamps now use the CampTix plugin to sell tickets and manage registration. Additionally, there is now an SVN repository for the WordCamp Base theme and our special WordCamp custom post types plugin, which means that community members can dig into and help improve these resources.

Stats!

2012
Number of WordCamps: 67
Number of WordCamps in the USA: 34
Number of WordCamps outside the USA: 33
Total Number of WordCamp Attendees: over 17,000
Total Days of WordCamp: 102
Number of sessions presented at WordCamps: 967
Number of people who spoke at WordCamps: 877
Number of companies that sponsored WordCamps: 498
New WordCamps: 22
The month with the most WordCamps: October, with 13 (and one BuddyCamp)
The month with the least WordCamps: December, with 1
WordCamp videos published to WordPress.tv: 445

2011
Number of WordCamps: 52
Number of WordCamps in the USA: 25
Number of WordCamps outside the USA: 27
Total Number of WordCamp Attendees: over 13,000
Total Days of WordCamp: 74
Number of sessions presented at WordCamps: 429
Number of people who spoke at WordCamps: 450
Number of companies that sponsored WordCamps: 313
New WordCamps: 15
The month with the most WordCamps: November, with 9
The months with the least WordCamps: March and April, with 1 each
WordCamp videos published to WordPress.tv: 271

At the end of 2012, the WordPress Events contributor group was created, and we now have 6 subcommittees of volunteers working on exciting ways to make the WordCamp program even better.

• The WordPress.tv Event Moderators group reviews and publishes WordCamp videos.
• The Event Planning Training Materials group is collecting and creating documentation for WordCamp organizers to use.
• The New Organizer Mentorship Program subcommittee is creating – you guessed it – a mentorship program for new WordCamp organizers.
• The Multi-Event Sponsorship Program subcommittee is creating a sponsorship program that will allow companies to sponsor multiple WordCamps more easily.
• The Review WordCamp Guidelines subcommittee is taking a look at current WordCamp guidelines and determining ways to improve them.
• WordCamp Base Theme Page Templates subcommittee is working up some page templates to help improve the special WordCamp Base theme that WordCamps use.

If you’d like to participate in the Events group, head over to http://make.wordpress.org/events/

Thank you to everyone who made WordCamps so amazing in 2012. Here’s to even bigger and better things in 2013!