Unlike in theoretical CS, a lot of work in WOOT's domain is done in the industry. So WOOT makes an effort to solicit contributions from the industry.
Does that make more sense?
† I hate that term, but look at the topics in the CFP to see what it means
The thing is technology companies, unlike pharmaceutical companies, automative companies, defence companies, or any other direct application of hard sciences, are more open to the idea of sharing their work with the rest of the community (academic or otherwise). People at Google for example has written highly cited papers about distributed systems, early compilers work has been largely influenced by industry (think FORTRAN). Even academics developed many ideas about their "academic" work while producing work in the industry. One example is the Norcroft compiler suite (first ARM compiler), is developed by two Cambridge academics and then lead to influential papers in compiler optimisations.
I think it is just the case that people in computer science do not look down on people who did not go through rigorous academic training. The barriers to entry for computer science in most areas is fairly low compared hard sciences because you do not need a fancy laboratory to get results.
Also you clearly have not even bothered to look through previous workshops more than half of the papers have university associations.
This science, unlike physics, or biology, is still at its infancy. People of all sort of backgrounds can contribute massively and they do so.