You Cannot Network Your Way Out Of A Value Problem: Why The WordCamp Rescue Plan Will Fail

Four days ago, the WordPress Community team published a plan for events in the United States and Canada through 2027. It is thoughtful, humane and painfully revealing. There has not been a local WordCamp in the US this year outside the flagship. Several attempts were postponed because venues disappeared, ticket sales did not arrive and organising teams were stretched. The old format, the author writes, ‘weighs the same whether eighty people come or eight hundred’.

That sentence is the sound of an institution finally hearing the floorboards crack.

The proposed answer is a three-stage recovery beginning with rebuilding meetups, then offering organisers a menu of lighter events rather than forcing every local community to recreate the traditional WordCamp banquet, badges, sponsor booths, volunteer rota and ceremonial group photograph. This is sensible. It is overdue. It will make events easier to organise.

It will not, by itself, make them worth attending.

“WordCamp does not have an attendance problem. It has a value problem wearing a lanyard.”

What exactly do I get for leaving the house?

For me, the calculation is brutally simple. Any business gathering has to return something quasi-tangible: knowledge I can use, a technique that makes me faster, an idea that makes me more creative, a sales method that improves my close rate, or a contact with an actual reason to speak to me again on Monday.

Not ‘connection’. Not ‘energy’. Not a tote bag carrying three hosting-company stickers and the vague sensation that open source happened nearby.

The standard conference promise is a few friendly handshakes from people whose names you will not remember, promises of ‘collaboration’ that evaporate before the train leaves the station, and seemingly endless talks by people who would like you to know how very successful they are. By the third coffee, you realise the case study has no numbers, the panel has no disagreement and the networking session consists of six freelancers trying to sell websites to one another.

That was tolerable when useful information was scarce. It is absurd in 2026. The talk is on YouTube tomorrow. The speaker’s method can be summarised by an AI in ninety seconds tonight. The product demo has a free trial. The person you might collaborate with is available on a video call without either of you crossing an ocean, booking a hotel or eating a miniature pastry beneath fluorescent lighting.

Physical attendance now has to beat instant, searchable, personalised knowledge delivered at home. ‘Come for the hallway track’ is not a value proposition. It is an admission that the scheduled part was not worth the journey.

Phoenix did recover. That does not mean the patient did

In August I called WordCamp US 2026 ‘A Wake With A Sponsor Hall’. At the time, roughly 440 tickets had been sold a month before an event officially expecting somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 people. The final number was much better: WordCamp Central recorded 1,156 tickets and organisers reported more than 1,100 registrations.

Good. Facts do not become inconvenient merely because they improve after publication. The late campaign worked. The beginner track, university outreach, hackathon Contributor Day and frantic final marketing push put bodies in Phoenix.

Now read the small print. The Repository reported that 418 of those tickets recorded no payment. The final total was roughly level with the already-depressed 1,200 of 2025, well below 1,928 in 2024 and barely half the 2,149 tickets sold in 2023. This was not a return to health. It was a late-stage ticket rescue in which more than a third of the tickets were free.

Giving something away is a perfectly valid way to widen access. It is not evidence that people value it enough to pay for the trip.

The Phoenix changes also reveal what organisers think the problem is: people need a clearer path in, more practical activity, beginner material and better promotion. All reasonable. Yet the official marketing experiment for WordCamp Asia earlier in the year had already delivered the warning. A concentrated burst of promotion increased traffic and engagement but did not meaningfully change ticket-buying behaviour. People saw the invitation. They simply did not reach for a card.

“You can improve awareness of an event nobody wants to attend. Congratulations: more people now know they are not going.”

The rescue package, opened and inspected

Across the last three years, WordPress has tried or proposed nearly every respectable event-saving idea available. None is foolish. None fixes the central problem.

• →Smaller, lighter ‘Next Generation’ events reduce organiser burnout and venue risk. Excellent. They make the failure cheaper; they do not manufacture demand.
• →A beginner track and student tickets create a gentler entrance. Useful. But beginners in 2026 are learning to describe a site to an AI, not memorise which sequence of plugins makes a block editor behave.
• →Campus Connect and WordPress Credits try to build a student pipeline. Worth doing. Also uncomfortably close to recruiting young people to maintain the machinery their tools are rapidly replacing.
• →Local influencer outreach may expose authors, photographers and small businesses to WordCamp. It may also expose them to three talks about contribution governance when what they wanted was more sales.
• →Longer workshops provide more practical depth. Good. The workshop still competes with a tailored tutorial available instantly, repeatedly and without a £900 travel bill.
• →A cheaper host city lowers accommodation costs. Necessary. It cannot make war, border anxiety, climate guilt, family logistics and lost billable days disappear.
• →More product-specific talks could make sessions practical. Matt Mullenweg’s February suggestion, however, linked that freedom to companies paying roughly $180,000 a year for global sponsorship. Apparently the cure for vendor theatre is premium vendor theatre.

These are improvements to the container. The problem is what the container contains.

It is a different world outside the sponsor hall

The event model was built for an era of cheaper travel, fatter training budgets and less capable remote communication. That era has been mugged by reality.

• →Financial pressure: flights, hotels, food and two or three non-billable days have to produce a measurable return. ‘I felt energised’ does not survive the expenses review.
• →Cost control: companies no longer send a small delegation because the team fancies a conference. One person attends, if anyone does, and writes notes for the rest.
• →Climate pressure: fewer travel miles are now policy, preference or conscience. Flying across a continent to hear a talk that is livestreamed is becoming harder to defend.
• →War and instability: conflict, border policy and entry uncertainty make international travel less attractive and sometimes impossible.
• →Remote maturity: the tools that kept business moving after 2020 did not vanish when conference organisers wanted their exhibition halls back.
• →AI compression: a day of generic conference instruction can now be condensed, challenged and adapted to your own business before breakfast.

A conference can overcome those forces, but only by offering something unobtainable elsewhere: exceptional access, genuinely original research, deep working sessions, real commercial introductions or decisions that shape the platform. Most WordCamps offer recorded talks, sponsor conversations and ‘community’. Pleasant things. Not £1,500 things.

Then there is the small matter of WordPress itself

Attendance is not declining in a vacuum. People are being asked to celebrate a platform while their confidence in its leadership is being fed through an industrial shredder.

Our previous article, ‘33 Hours And 20 Minutes’, covered the latest Mullenweg spectacle: Automattic’s board put him on paid leave, he returned as CEO within a day and a half, and the directors who moved against him departed along with the CFO and Chief Legal Officer. This followed the WP Engine war, the WordPress.org access bans, the loyalty-checkbox farce, the appropriation of Advanced Custom Fields and the continuing dispute over who controls what in an allegedly community-led project.

You cannot separate that from WordCamp sentiment. A third-party 2026 survey from the WP Open Community Collective found that a third of respondents who had previously attended WordPress events no longer did. It was a self-selecting survey of 431 people, not a census, so do not carve the percentage into stone. Do pay attention to the direction of travel: among those whose view of WordPress had changed over two years, the overwhelming movement was negative, with governance and leadership at the centre.

The community keeps trying to solve a trust crisis with event programming. Add a workshop. Create a student track. Invite a local photographer. Meanwhile, the founder is completing a boardroom counter-coup in less time than it takes the average WordCamp committee to approve a sandwich supplier.

“You cannot rebuild community attendance while the project’s leadership is converting community goodwill into legal evidence.”

And please retire the 43% comfort blanket

Whenever the empty-chair photographs become uncomfortable, somebody produces the sacred statistic: WordPress powers 43% of the web.

No, it does not — not in the way the sentence is used. The familiar W3Techs figure is an estimate based on websites whose content management system it can identify. It measures detected installations across its sample; it does not measure healthy businesses, active communities, new project preference, developer enthusiasm or future purchasing intent. It includes abandoned blogs, brochure sites last updated during the coalition government, staging debris, hacked shells and every shonky homepage that made it online before its owner discovered the price of a premium form plugin.

Installed base is not momentum. A cemetery has excellent resident retention.

The figure is also strategically useless to an event organiser. Forty-odd percent of sites does not mean forty-odd percent of web professionals want to fly to Phoenix. It means a huge quantity of legacy estate exists. Legacy estates generate maintenance. They do not automatically generate excitement, loyalty or ticket sales.

The uncomfortable global exception

To claim every WordCamp everywhere is collapsing would be satisfying and false. WordCamp Europe 2026 reported 2,458 ticket holders from 81 countries, including a substantial first-timer cohort. WordPress Foundation figures showed attendance across supported events rising globally in 2025, driven heavily by communities including India, Spain and the Philippines. WordCamp India is due to become a fourth flagship in 2027.

That matters. It tells us the funeral is not evenly distributed. The North American local model is in obvious distress; paid attendance at the European flagship took a serious hit in Basel before recovering somewhat in cheaper Kraków; growth remains possible where the community, economics and professional opportunity still align.

It also makes the proposed American rescue look weaker, not stronger. If events thrive where the platform still represents opportunity and fade where it increasingly represents legacy maintenance, the missing ingredient is not a better event template. It is a reason to care about WordPress’s future.

What would actually make me attend?

Not nostalgia. Not another session called ‘Building The Future Together’. Not a panel in which four plugin executives agree that community is important while checking sponsor leads on their phones.

Give attendees outcomes.

• →Publish a hard promise for every session: the skill, template, contact, decision or working asset an attendee leaves with.
• →Replace most presentations with small, facilitated working rooms where people solve a real business or technical problem and take the result home.
• →Ban biography disguised as education. If a case study has no costs, failures, baseline, result and reusable method, it is an advertisement and belongs in the sponsor hall.
• →Create buyer-and-supplier sessions with explicit commercial intent. Adults can cope with networking that admits somebody is there to buy something.
• →Make platform governance answerable in the room. Not a fireside cuddle, not pre-screened uplift, but recorded questions with published answers and follow-up dates.
• →Run regional events in one day, near transport, with no swag, no afterparty obligation and no pretence that a conference needs to become a mini-break.
• →Stop measuring success in registrations. Publish paid tickets, actual scans at the door, first-timers, repeat attendance and whether attendees achieved the outcome they came for.

That would not restore the old crowds. Nothing will. But it might produce smaller events whose attendees can explain, in a sentence containing a noun rather than an emotion, why they went.

WordCamps have had their day

The traditional WordCamp was a product of its time: open-source enthusiasm, scarce expertise, local agency growth, cheap-enough travel and a platform with cultural momentum. It did an extraordinary job. People learned, found work, built companies, made friends and created a worldwide ecosystem around free software.

That achievement deserves respect. It does not deserve indefinite reenactment.

The September plan recognises that organisers no longer want to carry the old weight. Good. Put it down. But do not pick up a smaller replica and call the problem solved. Meetups, workshops, hackathons, student programmes and lighter events will all produce pockets of worthwhile activity. Efforts aimed merely at bolstering attendance will mostly fail because attendance is an output, not a strategy.

People travel when the value exceeds the cost. Right now the cost is financial, environmental, professional and emotional. The value offered in return is often a livestream, a lanyard and the chance to hear that WordPress still powers 43% of the web from somebody whose company has just launched an AI product for building somewhere else.

In ‘Funeral For A Friend’, I said WordCamp US had become a wake with a sponsor hall. The organisers have now proposed smaller wakes, local wakes, student wakes and wakes with workshops.

All admirable improvements.

The deceased remains unavailable for comment.