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Applicants by Sector
August 30th, 2010
With only two days remaining to apply to THATCamp Bay Area, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at a breakdown of our applicants by sector. These are pretty broad sectors of course, and some people may fit into more than one, but I think it’s useful to break it down. As we have close to 100 applicants at this point, and only space to accommodate 75, we’ll be looking at sectors as an important factor.
Our three bigges sectors, respectively, are academic, commercial, and library.
3 Responses to “Applicants by Sector”
SO glad you’re collecting this info, Jon! Did you provide a field for applicants to self-identify on the application form? I’d also be curious to know how much outreach you’ve done, and how you’ve done it — where you’ve announced and so on.
Unfortunately, I thought of it after we had already opened applications, so I’ve gouped people into sectors based on their affiliations or descriptions. It would be great to give people the ability to pick their sector in future applications–not only is it good data but it makes clear that we’re looking for all kinds of different people.
We did a lot of outreach and really worked hard to reach out to different sectors, though it always feels like we could do more! When we started talking about THATCamp Bay Area, there were just a couple of us, and one of the first things we did was recruit an organizing committee of people in the Bay Area from different sectors. We simply asked them for permission to list them on our website, and help us reach out to sponsors and their contacts. It was great to get the support from Automattic and WordPress.com and sponsorship from several other commercial companies. We also only asked for sponsorship at the $200 and $500 levels to keep them affordable and hopefully get the involvement of groups that haven’t had the opportunity to participate in THATCamp before. As you can see, that worked out well, and we have sponsorship from libraries, museum associations, digital humanities centers, non-profits and developers. This has helped us get the word out to people we might not have reached otherwise. Also, some folks who weren’t able to sponsor us helped by making mentions on their Twitter feeds or online newsletters.
I urge you to also do a breakdown by country and age if possible. Cultural myopia (aka as “echo chambers”) is of particular concern for the issues people will probably want to discuss at THATCamp.