I’m very happy to announce that we have identified the locations for the WordCamp Incubator program 2018 — and I’m particularly pleased to announce that we’ve been able to select *two* incubator locations! 🙂

The communities which will take part in 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. Incubator program this year will be:

• Montevideo, Uruguay — working with Roberto Remedios, @remediosgraphic
• Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia — working with Emanuel Blagonic, @emanuel_blagonic

The other locations that were short-listed have been encouraged to explore the idea of organizing a local 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. group and/or WordCamp in their communities, and have been promised extra help from mentors if they are interested in giving it a shot. So we hope to hear from some groups on that list! 🙂

A rough outline of how this will go:

Montevideo and Kota Kinabalu will work with their respective co-leads to start a monthly WordPress meetup group to the chapter account program. Once the local WordPress user group is meeting regularly, each team will work on finding a venue, setting a date, recruiting speakers, and spreading the word about the upcoming WordCamp. I’m thinking all two of these events will happen in the last quarter of 2018, but that’s flexible based on the preferences and needs of each local community.

Each organizing team will meet with their co-lead on a weekly/biweekly basis. The co-lead will act as a sort of a project manager and mentor for the local team, training them to organize a WordCamp and following up on their progress regularly. Co-leads who are mentoring incubator WordCamps will report the progress of their teams on a monthly Incubator Update thread that I’ll initiate here.

In addition to the extra-extra support we’ll provide to the local team around keeping on schedule and thinking of All The Things, we’ll help them find speakers and sponsors.  Our goal will be to feature no more than 3 non-local speakers at each event. As for sponsorship, the global sponsorship grant for these events will cover 100% of the event’s fundraising needs, so that organizers don’t need to spend much time drumming up sponsorship. We’ll accept local sponsors of course, but incubator events won’t be given a local fundraising goal that they need to meet.

As a reminder, the goal for these events is to organize an easily reproducible, one-day, one-track event with about 50-75 attendees. Hopefully by the end of the organizing/incubating experience, members of the local community will feel confident that they can organize an annual WordCamp independently in the years to come.

If you have any question about the incubator locations or our expectations for the program, please ask them in the comments!

#incubator, #wordcamps