# Curated Mastery Conferences Serve Practitioners That Volume Conferences Cannot Remkus de Vries argues that the WordPress event calendar is saturated with broad, volume-optimized conferences and is missing the opposite: a small, **curated conference for practitioners at the mastery end** — refinement over reach, depth over breadth, with *paid* speakers as the signal that expertise is valued rather than donated. The claim is that the marginal value has flipped: another big-tent WordCamp adds little for the experienced professional, while a deliberately small, high-bar gathering addresses a need the volume format structurally can't. The "pay the speakers" point is doing real work. Unpaid speaking treats expert time as a marketing donation, which selects for speakers who need the exposure and against those who've already earned it. Paying speakers is both a quality filter and a values statement — it's the event-level version of refusing to treat skilled contribution as free. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Why This Matters For **DevRel and community strategy**, this is a segmentation argument applied to events. The same logic as [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Developer Segmentation Requires Four Filters Not One]] — a single event format can't serve novices and masters at once; the mastery segment needs a different venue, not a bigger one. It also rhymes with [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/When Answers Are Cheap Understanding Becomes the Scarce Good]]: when introductory content and big conferences are abundant, the scarce, valuable good is curated depth among peers who are past the basics. For the **economics of contribution**, paying speakers connects to [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Stewardship Invests in Contributor Capacity Not Just Cash]] and [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Coerced Contribution Kills the Commons]] — relying on free expert labor is a hidden tax on the commons; paying for it is how you sustain the contributor base you depend on. ## Counterpoints to Hold - **Curation is exclusion.** A high-bar, small conference draws a boundary that can ossify into in-group gatekeeping; "mastery" is a judgment someone makes, and it can entrench incumbents. - **Volume conferences do essential work.** Big-tent events are the on-ramp and the community glue; framing them as low-value to the expert undersells their role for everyone else. - **Paid-speaker economics are hard.** Paying speakers raises ticket prices or needs sponsors, which reintroduces the commercial pressures the curation was meant to escape. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Literature Notes/Lit · The WordPress conference we need next]] — the conference proposal supplies the practitioner-segmentation and paid-speaker case - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Developer Segmentation Requires Four Filters Not One]] — the segmentation logic; events need it too - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/When Answers Are Cheap Understanding Becomes the Scarce Good]] — curated depth is the scarce good when breadth is abundant - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Stewardship Invests in Contributor Capacity Not Just Cash]] — paying speakers as investing in contributor capacity - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Coerced Contribution Kills the Commons]] — unpaid expert labor as a hidden tax - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Event Recap Process]] — applies-in: a preplanned recap workflow preserves the practitioner depth and shared evidence that a curated event is meant to create. - [[3. Resources/Literature Notes/Lit · Pay WordCamp organizers and speakers]] — evidence-for: paying organizers and speakers makes conference values visible by funding the expert participation a curated event depends on. ## Open Questions - Who curates, and how is the mastery bar kept from becoming an incumbency moat? - Can paid-speaker economics work without sponsor capture reintroducing the volume-conference incentives? ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/The WordPress Conference We Need Next|The WordPress Conference We Need Next]] — Remkus de Vries: curated mastery/refinement conference; quality over quantity; pay the speakers - See also: [[DevRel MOC]], [[WordCamp Europe 2026 MOC]]