We’ve received many incredible speaker nominations from the WordPress community! The deadline to submit is August 22, 2021 at 11:59 pm CT (UTC -5) / 4:59am Saturday (UTC).
As always, we get hundreds of worthy session submissions each year. In both 2018 and 2019, we received over 500 submissions for each year. It’s truly a challenge to have to decline so many quality applications with the limited number of program slots that are available, and it’s even more challenging this year with a one-day event. Right now we are focusing on traditional full-length and lightning talks, but we are hoping to be able to offer more programming opportunities.
(Please note: a nomination and invitation to submit a talk are not a guarantee of speaker selection. Invited speakers will be notified at a later date.)
Things to Consider When Applying As a Speaker
As you are thinking about what ideas you want to submit as a speaker at WordCamp US Online 2021, we wanted to alert you to a few key things to consider.
Session Limits
We are limiting the number of sessions you can submit this year to three. This might feel limiting, however, we are doing this for a variety of reasons. The main reason is time. We want to dedicate the time each submission deserves to truly review and consider how it can fit within our programming. If we limit the amount each person can submit, it allows speakers to submit their best-of-the-best ideas and for the organizing team to be able to more effectively consider each submission.
Topic Recommendations
Our scope for WordCamp US this year is Connection, Contribution, and Inspiration. All themes within those parameters are welcome. In addition, the following recommendations shared in our call for nominations are still applicable as “idea starters” for how your presentation might fit within the theme. By no means is this a complete list. While using your submission limit wisely, submit the most impactful stories and information you feel would benefit the WordPress community.
- Blocks
- Making and using block patterns (end-user focused)
- Building a block – 101 class style
- What you can do with full-site editing (FSE)
- Using blocks to design a website for performance, accessibility, and sustainability
- Contribution
- Why should companies make contributing to open source a priority
- Finding your place to contribute
- WordPress for the next generation
- Inspiration
- How WordPress enabled an inspiring story
- WordPress success stories
- From side hustle to entrepreneur stories
- Work-life balance
- Connection
- Marketing best practices for WordPress sites
- Content strategies
- Traffic generation
- Creating your customer community (lessons from WP community could be interesting, extrapolated to a business)
- eCommerce best practices
- Making WordPress accessible for all
- Copywriting for WordPress
- Connection while working remotely
- WordPress in the classroom/educational settings
- Marketing best practices for WordPress sites
- Site Performance
- Site Performance Optimization
- Core Web Vitals & SEO
Session Recommendations
As a single-day, online-only event, much of the content presented at WordCamp US 2021 may be repurposed on learn.wordpress.org providing an opportunity for evergreen content that can help beginners and experts alike deepen their knowledge and capabilities with WordPress. Consideration of this within your speaking application would be helpful to the speaker selection committee.
Full length, WordPress focused
As our goals with programming this year aim towards creating content that will help WordPress users become more successful with the platform, your first submission could ideally be focused on teaching users something they didn’t know when they signed on for WordCamp US 2021. We want to ensure that the content covered at this year’s WCUS is memorable and shared, ensuring that, no matter if online, in-person or hybrid, all future WCUS events are seen as those not to be missed.
Lightning length, skill mastery focused
Your second and/or third submission could be creative and different than what you might normally submit to a WordCamp. We are all unique, and we all do things a little differently. Share with us something that you have mastered in your life. It could be WordPress related or it could be completely off-the-topic of WordPress, but the skills you learned could be applied to the WordPress world. All of us have been affected during the pandemic, and we know there are many stories that can be shared. These submissions should be submitted as lightning-session length talks.
Now remember, these are just suggestions. You have three submission slots and you can submit whatever you would like with them, but we wanted to ensure that you knew what we are hoping to see in our submissions this year.
In addition, this year we are encouraging speakers to include at least one talk that could be deliverable via video – either live or prerecorded.
WCUS Programming Office Hours
Because ensuring that we have a diverse group of speakers and a variety of great topics is important, we want to be available to answer questions when possible and in a timely manner.
While we do not have official office hours, our team will be monitoring the WordPress Slack instance in the the #WCUS channel. There is a helpful guide to joining the WordPress Slack for those that haven’t already. Feel free to ask your question(s) and our team members will respond in the Slack channel (or privately if appropriate) as soon as possible. Questions will be answered up until the submission deadline, August 22, 2021 at 11:59 pm CT (UTC -5) / 4:59am Saturday (UTC).
More Than Just Sessions
As we mentioned above, there is much more to come in terms of programming at WordCamp US this year, but know that we are considering a variety of extended programming opportunities. We are open to your suggestions on anything new you would like to see. In the comments section below, please kindly tell us something that you wish WordCamp US would offer this year.