Angela Jin 9:35 am on March 12, 2020  

Latest updates on changes to WordCamps

COVID-19 has impacted many WordCamps globally. To help you keep track of the latest changes to WordCamps, we will be updating this list periodically.

Note that “Cancelled” means that the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. will not happen in 2020, but there may be plans for a 2021 event. “Postponed” indicates that the organizing team is working towards making an event happen later this year.

Last updated March 31, 2020 at 9:00 UTC

  • WordCamp Asia, February 21 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Cebu, February 29, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Lancaster, March 14, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Albuquerque, March 20, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, March 20, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Geneva, March 20, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Kolkata, March 22, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Washington DC, March 27, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Antwerp, March 28, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp San Antonio, March 28, 2020 – Moved to livestream
  • WordCamp Jacksonville, March 28, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Santa Clarita, April 3, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Turin (Torino), April 17, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Paris, April 17, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Atlanta, April 18, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Bilbao, April 24, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Bucharest, April 25, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Kansas City, April 28, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Soltau, April 30, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Chicago, May 2, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp San Diego, May 2, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Houston, May 9, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Buffalo, May 9, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Madrid, May 9, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Athens, May 16, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Košice, May 16, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Plovdiv, May 16, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Kathmandu, May 20, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Irun, May 23, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Calgary, May 29, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Kent, May 30, 2020 – Moved to livestream
  • WordCamp Montclair, May 30, 2020 – Postponed
  • WordCamp Europe, June 4-6, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Raleigh, June 6, 2020 – Cancelled
  • WordCamp Centroamerica, September 17, 2020 – Cancelled

Are you a WordCamp organizer and unsure of how to proceed? Here are a few helpful links.

Andrea Middleton 11:59 am on March 11, 2020  

New recommendations for event organizers in light of COVID-19

I’m sure that WordPress community organizers all over the world are keeping a watchful eye on the news related to COVID-19. Many organizers have received questions and recommendations from their communities about whether to continue meeting in person, in the absence of direct instructions from the public health authorities in their towns or countries. 

We are a team of people dedicated to bringing people together, and our community events are a labor (much labor!) of love. WordPress community organizers have carved out time from their busy schedules, sacrificed time with family/friends or that would have been dedicated to other causes, and taken on very challenging work (we make it look easy, but it’s not!) in order to plan community events. Naturally, we approach the topic of postponing or cancelling our events with deep reluctance and sadness. 

That said, one of our fundamental priorities must be to preserve the health and well-being of our attendees and communities. Making decisions that support the effort to “flatten the curve” — slowing the rate of infection so that health care systems are not overwhelmed — is both responsible and prudent. 

In cities or countries where the public health officials have restricted public gatherings, I trust that organizers will follow the advice of authorities. For organizers with events planned in cities or states that have not yet made public health recommendations, the decision is much more difficult. We have not trained organizers to assess risks like these, because our program has never had to adapt to a global epidemic of this scale. To support organizers in this difficult decision, here is the recommendation:

If you are planning an event scheduled between now and June 1, and there is any evidence of community transmission of COVID-19 in your area, we strongly recommend that you postpone the event until later in the year or 2021 and/or adapt to an online event.

Please review this handbook page for recommendations on postponement vs cancellation of a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more., and procedures for both. This recommendation stands for both meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. events and WordCamps.

If your community has not yet seen evidence of community transmission of COVID-19, please take extra precautions with attendee health:

  • Discuss event details with local health officials and prepare to implement an emergency contingency plan based on their specific guidance.
  • Share and provide COVID-19 updates on your WordCamp site, and promote preventive health messages to your attendees and volunteers, such as:
    • Stay home when you are sick, except to get medical care.
    • Cover your coughs and sneezes with a tissue or sleeve, then put the tissue a the garbage bin.
    • Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
    • Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands. Clean frequently touched surfaces and objects daily.
    • Recommend that attendees minimize close contact (e.g., recommending no handshaking or hugging)
  • Encourage participants who are experiencing any symptoms consistent with COVID-19 to refrain from attending the conference. 
  • Make sure that every attendee has registered via purchasing the ticket or marking their attendance in meetup.com so that if someone gets sick, it will be easier for public health authorities to identify those at risk of infection.
  • Create refund policies or remote participation capability (such as arranging to live stream the event, if possible) that permit participants the flexibility to stay home when they are sick, need to care for sick household members, or are at high risk for complications from COVID-19.

It’s possible we will extend this recommendation past June, depending on what happens in April and May. Please expect updates on a monthly basis, if not more frequently.  

Support and training for online event planning is in the works. Next week I hope we can publish a handbook page with advice for temporarily adapting monthly meetup events so they can be held online, and the infrastructure and documentation to support organizers interested in holding WordCamps online are targeted for publication by the end of March.

I recognize that this is a terribly difficult time for many, and community deputies are available to help. Please email support@wordcamp.org with any questions or concerns, or share your concerns in a comment on this post.

WordCamp.org 4:00 am on April 6, 2020
Tags:   

Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizers, MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!

Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. and ask for help!

Timi Wahalahti 1:59 pm on April 4, 2020
Tags:   

Request for feedback: Revising application tracker back-end

Some time ago during a conversation with the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team, we found that it would be wise to revise WordCamp and MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. application tracker back-end.

The goal is to identify which features or fields are not used anymore, if there’s a need for new features and what features or processed would need improvements.

Application trackers are heavily used by Community Team Deputies and making the user experience as good as it’s reasonably possible, will hopefully ease and speed up the use of tracker. Improving the trackers can free up some time used to update Meetup and WordCamp information, allowing deputies to focus on the most important thing – helping the event organizers in worldwide WordPress Community.

After comments and ideas on improving the tracker are gathered, I will review those and write a follow-up proposal with concrete proposals and actionable tasks. After those tasks are reviewed, approved ones will be moved to WordPress.org Github issue tracker and I commit to work on those (help is always welcome!)

Please share your thoughts and ideas before 2020-05-04.

#applications

Ryan Marks 7:48 pm on April 3, 2020
Tags: #events-news-widget, #online-events,   

Showing online workshops in the Events Widget

This post is similar to @iandunn‘s post, “Showing Online WordCamps in the Events Widget”, but in this case we are talking about Community workshops. The topic has come up because of the Diverse Speaker workshop on April 14-16. Other online global community workshops are likely to follow.

In the second Community Team chat Thursday, we were discussing how to promote this Speaker workshop. I suggested it could be possible to use the Events WidgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user.. Some discussion occurred in #meta-wordcamp as well which parallel’s Ian’s post.

A few differences to note from online WordCamps:

  • This workshop is being organized from Vancouver. I think the location of the organizers should be ignored since a typical radius would exclude potential interested participants.
  • This workshop will be held April 14-16 for one hour each at 1800 UTC / 2pm EDT.
  • This workshop will be offered in English.

I propose similar questions to Ian’s post, with a few modifications.

Questions

  1. Should Community Team online training workshops show up in the widget?
  2. If so, who should they be shown to? Here are a few potential criteria:
    • Everyone within a timezone where the event would occur between 8am – 8pm in the user’s local timezone.
    • Everyone who speaks the same language — or locale? — as the workshop.
    • A combination of the above? Some other criteria entirely?
  3. Should the timezone and/or language of the event be displayed in the dashboard?

+make.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.
+make.wordpress.org/coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.

#events-news-widget, #online-events

Andrea Middleton 6:47 pm on April 3, 2020  

Online conference platform concerns

As I mentioned in one of our team meetings yesterday, I made the call to provide support for community events to use Crowdcast as an online event platform a few weeks ago, without testing whether the tool was fully accessible. Unfortunately, Crowdcast doesn’t meet the community team’s needs for accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), and I’m really, really sorry about that mistake. I acted in a hurry, motivated by the desire to make a powerful tool available to event organizers as soon as possible, but should have thought to test the accessibility of the platform before setting our team on that path. I know better, and I apologize.

Since Crowdcast is not currently navigable by keyboard-only users — thank you to Rachel and others for bringing this to our attention! — it’s not a viable option for WordPress community events to use right now. My understanding is that the company is working to resolve those issues quickly, so I hold out hope that we’ll be able to use them in the future.

This does mean that the training material and documentation supporting Crowdcast usage will not be relevant right now, and that a bunch of people pushed hard to work on docs that we can’t currently use. I’m so disappointed that my error might have either wasted our volunteers’ valuable time or delayed the benefits of that hard work. Kudos to @marktimemedia, @kaysweb, @bph, @angelasjin, @nao, @chaion07, @casiepa, @andymci, @camikaos & @hlashbrooke for their efforts, and I hope you’ll all accept my apology.  

Our team is committed to making our offline events as accessible and inclusive as possible, and we will work to meet the same expectations for our online events.

Next steps

Community deputies are working on identifying and vetting other platforms that we might be able to recommend to community organizers.  If you would like to participate in identifying, reviewing, and testing other possible platforms, here is a shared spreadsheet where options can be suggested and feedback can be captured. 

Thanks for any support you can give to this effort at a very uncertain time for all of us. 

Ian Dunn 11:01 pm on April 2, 2020
Tags: ,   

X-post: Showing Online WordCamps in the Events Widget

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/core: Showing Online WordCamps in the Events Widget

jillbinder 3:44 am on April 2, 2020
Tags:   

Call for Participants: Diverse Speaker Workshop Online April 14-16

During this time of online events, the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) would like to facilitate more diverse voices sharing knowledge and stories in the virtual space. We are going to hold a 3-part workshop, one hour each day, to help people with:

  • Dispelling some myths about speakers/speaking (Overcoming the thought, “But I’m not an expert in anything”)
  • Coming up with topics and choosing one (Answering the question, “I wouldn’t know what to talk about!”)
  • Writing a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. description or WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. pitch
  • Online stage presence (new!)

These will all be held at 6-7pm UTC / 2-3pm ET:

  • Tuesday, April 14: Who am I to be speaking? & Finding a topic that people would love to hear (No prerequisite)
  • Wednesday, April 15: Creating a great pitch (Prerequisite: Please come with an idea for a talk. If you don’t have one, then please make sure you attend Tuesday!)
  • Thursday, April 16: Online stage presence (No prerequisite)

You are encouraged to attend all sessions, but you are also welcome to attend only the sessions you wish.

Please note! This training is intended to train speakers who are members of a marginalized or underrepresented group in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, age, etc.

If this is you, please sign up in the Registration form!

Everyone, please help us spread the word.

Register for the workshop session(s) now

—

P.S. Others who like to attend these sessions because you want to learn how to be good allies, please note that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion material is not covered in these workshops. If there is enough interest, we could hold a different workshop for you in the future.

Also, we have two documents for you: Building A Diverse Speaker Roster and Inclusive and Welcoming Events.

Mary Job 10:05 pm on March 31, 2020
Tags:   

Community Team Chat Agenda | 02 April 2020

Hello Team!

Our bi-monthly Community Team chat is happening this Thursday, 2nd of April 2020. Meeting times are detailed below. We use the same agenda for both meetings in order to include all time zones.

Asia-Pacific / EMEA friendly: Thursday, April 2, 2020, 11:00 UTC

Americas friendly: Thursday, April 2, 2020, 20:00 UTC

Deputy/Mentor check-in

What have you been doing and how is it going?

P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. posts needing review/feedback

  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/20/taking-charity-hackathons-online/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/24/community-events-in-the-time-of-covid-19/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/25/recap-of-the-diverse-speaker-training-group-wpdiversity-zoom-call-on-march-25-2020/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/26/youth-event-office-hours/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/27/meetup-organiser-newsletter-online-events-edition/

Highlighted P2 posts

  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/12/latest-updates-on-changes-to-wordcamps/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/11/new-recommendations-for-event-organizers-in-light-of-covid-19/

Please add any additional items to this agenda by commenting on this post as needed.

#team-chat

WordCamp.org 4:00 am on March 30, 2020
Tags:   

Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizers, MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!

Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. and ask for help!

Hugh Lashbrooke 11:34 am on March 27, 2020
Tags:   

Meetup Organiser Newsletter: Online Events Edition

Hi there folks!

Welcome to another meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organiser newsletter – in this edition we’ll be highlighting some upcoming virtual events and providing you with more info about taking your events online!

Upcoming Online Events

With much of the world either on lockdown or in recommended self-isolation, organizers all over the world are taking their events online. The WordPress community is no exception to this trend as many meetups, WordCamps, and other events in the community are being streamed online for the whole world to enjoy.

WordCamp San Antonio

As WordCamps begin to move online, the first to do so is WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. San Antonio taking place this weekend – March 28-29. You can see the full schedule on their site (all times in the local time zone of UTC-5) and book your free ticket here. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll start to see many more WordCamps be presented as live streams. If you are an organizer who would like to get started with this for your community, then keep an eye on the Community Team blog as more info about online events will be published very soon.

WPBlockTalk

On Thursday, April 2 a virtual event all about the WordPress blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. editor will be broadcast live. WPBlockTalk includes speakers from all over the world and, after the live event, will be published on WordPress.tv for you to watch (or re-watch) whenever you’d like.

Online Meetups

It’s not only WordCamps and all-day conferences that are streaming online, but local WordPress meetup groups are also doing it too! You can find all the upcoming online events from WordPress meetup groups all over the world on this page – times will be shown in your local time zone unless otherwise noted. 

Resources for Online Events

If you would like to take your meetup online, we have some resources available to help you get started with streaming your expertly-crafted content to the world. First off, we need to note that for the time being, we won’t be approving or paying venue-related costs for meetup groups, even if it is in advance for when you do ultimately start meeting in person again. We don’t know what the situation will be once in-person meetings are possible once more and it is safer to only pay for those venues once we know how it will work.

In order to assist you with bringing your meetup events online, we have put together a page of resources and tips to provide with ideas and software options for this move. Additionally, Meetup.com has published information on how to indicate that your event is taking place online. If you follow their guide then your events will be listed in the online meetup events page that is mentioned above.

During this time, when everyone is connecting virtually with each other, people are joining forces with other local communities that speak the same language. The Global Community Team has removed location limitations and reduced the planning process to a minimum. WordCamp CentralWordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each. will provide Crowdcast accounts for these longer online events (more info coming soon!) and they will have free tickets for everyone around the globe to be able to join without any financial limitation.

If your community is interested, you can submit the WordCamp Organizer Application now!

Running Charity Hackathons Online

For the last few years, we have included the do_action Charity Hackathon event series in the WordPress community program, and there are some handy recap posts on the WordPress Foundation site all about how these events have been going. In order to keep these going, we have opened the event format up a bit to allow them to be run online. You can find more information about that in the announcement, and if you would like to organize a do_action event, you can apply for one here.

If you have any questions or concerns, Community Team deputies are available to help. Please send an email to support@wordcamp.org or join the #community-events Slack channel. Please note that our Meetup.com inbox is not monitored, so please don’t reach out by replying directly to this message.

Thanks for everything you do to grow the WordPress community, let’s keep sharing knowledge and inspiring our Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. Community! 

We’ll see you online soon!

Sandy Edwards 1:19 pm on March 26, 2020
Tags: ,   

Youth Event Office Hours

In light of everything going on with COVID-19 and needing to move events to a remote status. We are changing our Youth Events Working Group meetings to be Office Hours. This is so that anyone can come to #community-events channel and ask any questions about how to help the kids at home during this time.

If you want to start a virtual meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area., get resources for your own family or just talk about things kids can do safely online our group is here to support it.

This will happen weekly on Thursdays at 2100UTC/5pm EST.

If anyone wants to help with more International Friendly times please reach out and let either @camikaos or myself (@sunsand187) know.

#kids-events, #youth-events