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Many WordCamp talks are repeated over and over again, sometimes in the same region in the same year. Some speakers even give the same talk (or attempt to give the same talk) year after year in the same city. As many people are willing (and do) travel a few hours to attend a WordCamp, we are doing those attendees a disservice by not featuring new and original content for them.
How can we as a community encourage speakers to create new talks? How can we ensure that WordCamp attendees are able to learn new things no matter if this is there first or fifth WordCamp?
A big +1 (would that be a +3) to this topic. It’s a balancing act in that we want to provide new information to repeat WordCamp attendees, yet each event also features a nontrivial number of first-time folks who might benefit from seeing the same/similar material as has been presented in past years.
+1 This is something to Seattle WordPress community is exploring right now and something I think we have to think about with WordCamps. We want them to be something that people of all experience levels can get something out of just not newbies.
+1. I agree that it’s a balancing act — I know many speakers (myself among them) will hone a talk over several WordCamp events, but I think it’s best to “retire” them rather than repeating year over year.
In Boston we’ve found that the meetup is sometimes a good release-valve for people who want to continue to contribute their time and their voices, but would be considered repeat or duplicate content at a WordCamp. Especially since meetups tend to get videotaped/archived at a lower rate than WordCamps, this can help mitigate the “same old” sense with some presenters and keep things fresh when they do bring an updated talk to a WordCamp.
Just re-read what I wrote, and to clarify, I don’t support considering meetups as “lesser” than WordCamps, or in using less stringent content standards: but it provides *many* more opportunities over the course of a year.
Repetitive “talks” does seem to be a serious issue … with several (4 or 5?) WordCamps being very close at hand geographically I find it really disappointing to see the same speakers doing the same talks at each WordCamp (some within weeks of the other).
I think it would be great to have some way to promote and/or incentivize a diversity of topics/talks even if the speakers themselves appear to be the same group caravanning from one WordCamp to the next.
Playing devil’s advocate here, there are some talks that are constantly applying to new groups of people. The developers that learned from your talk last year are better now and don’t need it, but new ones do. Just because there is some overlap from one year to the next at a conference doesn’t mean it’s 100% (what is that percent, do we know it?), and your talk might appeal to all the new people.
Having said that, there’s clearly a balance to be had and there might be some good guidelines that could be suggested to help event organizers find that balance.
+1
I recently heard a speaker say they didn’t need to prepare ahead of time because “I’ve given that talk so many times I can do it in my sleep.” That’s the kind of thinking that makes for a bad talk (and it showed).
I do believe that a topic can be useful multiple times, but the ones I’ve seen like that could best fit in a “beginners” track at WordCamp, rather than grouped together with everything else.
I think that we can encourage speakers to create new talks if they were properly reimbursed for their efforts, or at least some help with the traveling costs. I can say without a doubt that there is a HUGE benefit in getting to participate in WordCamps out of your area, and I was wondering if there were any sponsorships or scholarship programs in place to help increase the diversity of speakers as well as encourage them to create new content and take the education seriously.
I am really disappointed when I see speakers blow off their presentation slides and seem very unprepared and come across with the the attitude that they are doing us a favor by being there. I would like to see more speakers with more content and more friendly competition, and I think the community would benefit with that also. I think that in rewarding speakers that create quality content with more speaking gigs and help with travel expenses would definitely make speaking more accessible to a greater number of people wanting to give back to the community.
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