The current way how WordCamp Europe is organized is a joke to me. It was claimed by a group of people without even checking who else wanted to organize it. That is something that irritates me since such kind of WordCamp should be elected somehow. It isn’t a small event and it can be misused for personal/business interest. What is something I disapprove.
One part of the reason why I say this is because I was planning to organize it in the end of 2011 and I even wrote a blog post about it. I even had a few plans on how to do this and possible cities where it make sense to organize it. But someone told me that WordCamp Central was planning this. When WordCamp Europe was announced I did some research and founded out that there never was a real plan for this but to me the plan sounded pretty stable and what I heard sounded good. Because of that I put my progress on hold and I already worked out quite a bit. I was waiting for the announcement till I heard different at WordCamp Lisbon.
Another thing is that they don’t want people to join the team. I tried once and they said yes but when there was a meeting they didn’t asked me to join. The same counts when it was discussed at the WordPress community summit. I wasn’t asked again to join the conversation and there where more European people that should have been asked to join the discussion.
The thing what also irritated there was that people where talking about it. Like that it would be in The Netherlands and someone could help out there. I was sitting there and thinking by myself like what about me. I also live there. It was very disrespectful against me and I do believe that I didn’t deserved that. I guess in Europe we got several WordPress groups. And I’m happy to be in the honest group that loves to share and help out.
This all doesn’t mean I will not be there. I love the people who will be around and I’m happy that a lot of people will fly over from the states. This is just something what I wanted to say for a long period and wasn’t able to find the correct words. It is not my intention to attack people with this but I’m not going to be silent about my opinion and also I want to open the discussion about it since that has never taken place.