Comment by photomatt

Some people choose to attend other camps because they are concerned about the US border issues. If you zoom out, we're also trying to spend time on various events, such as Campus Connect, which don't show up in those numbers. However, indeed, we haven't yet reached our pre-COVID in-person attendance levels, which peaked around 40k/yr across all camps, and we're now around half that. COVID hit us pretty hard, and we haven't yet figured out the right formula for everything, but it's showing positive momentum in meetups, camps, and the new educational events.

One challenging thing about WordCamps is you get people coming who are completely non-technical and just want to blog, all the way to hardcore devs who want interesting technical content. There were some great talks at WordCamp US, if you check it out you'll see how we tried to balance that.