The WordCamp Portland organizing team got together this past week and made some hard decisions about who will (and won’t) be part of our lineup of featured speakers for this year’s event. We’re confirming things with our speakers and will be announcing the first set of speakers early this coming week, but here are some interesting stats about our speaker submissions this year:

• 35 people proposed a total of 51 sessions
• Of those 51 proposed sessions, 12 will be offered as our feature presentations
• This means we had to turn down over 75% of the proposed sessions
• 13 of the sessions (25%) were proposed by women
• Of the 35 folks who submitted topics, about half (18) were from outside the Portland metro area.
• Of the people selected in our initial round of speaker choices, about half are from outside the Portland metro area.
• We asked potential speakers to identify the audience for their talks, offering them four choices. Of the 51 sessions, here’s how many times each choice was tagged for the potential audience (more than one audience could be identified per talk):
  • WordPress Beginners: 27
  • Experienced Bloggers: 19
  • Designers: 14
  • Developers: 29
• Our program will be approximately 2/3 prescheduled sessions and 1/3 unconference sessions.