Since I wasn’t at IWMW this year it is hard to comment, but I can say on previous experience that IWMW can be quite a mix of ‘marketing/design’ and ‘techy’ people – because where the role of ‘web manager’ sits within an organisation can vary.

In the past I attended IWMW as the head of the ‘tech’ part of the web, with my colleague who was responsible for the marketing/design aspects – we were based in different depts in the institution, but clearly had to work closely to deliver the institutional website.

Whereas there was a time when IWMW was about the tech aspects of the web, I would say that by IWMW 2005 there was a strong marketing/design aspect to the workshop, and that there was a good mix of people attending – I felt that in 2005 IWMW really acheived a dialogue between the different approaches that people brought to ‘institutional web’. I don’t think this necessarily resulted in agreement about the issues, but I thought that it was a great venue for moving on the conversation and working towards more mutual respect between the two approaches.

Perhaps this has changed (I haven’t been to IWMW since 2006), or perhaps you just went down the pub with the hardcore techy component. If the majority of people really had SQL and Repositories high on their wishlists it seems that perhaps the people attending have changed – possibly this points to a maturing of the web as a medium and so those techies who were interested in HTML and CSS now leave this to the non-techies and the CMS, while they move onto pastures new?