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Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup 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 Slack and ask for help!

Upcoming workshop: How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events

This is an event for people from marginalized or underrepresented groups in WordPress in AMER & EMEA and for participants in our Allyship program who have taken the “Allyship for WordPress event organizers” workshop on August 19th, 2021.

The Diverse Speaker Training Group (#WPDiversity) invites you to join us for a workshop in a fun format: an Interactive, Transformational Watch Party! We will watch a video on Learn WordPress.

Facilitators: @onealtr and @volkswagenchick

Does the thought of speaking at one of our WordPress meetups or WordCamps intrigue you? This is a workshop for people from marginalized and underrepresented groups who are thinking about speaking at a meetup or WordCamp. The focus of this hands-on session is to look at what has stopped you from speaking in the past and explore how to move past your fears, generate WordPress-related topics to give a talk on, boost your speaking confidence, and allow you to practice speaking in a safe space. At the end of the workshop, you will have a few ideas for talks that the community wants to hear!

***You do NOT have to have any experience in public speaking. This workshop is for all levels of experience.***

WordPress Meetup and WordCamp organizers: Want to foster more diverse speaker lineups for your events? Please invite your communities!

Friday, 27 August 2021
5.00PM – 6.30PM UTC / 1.00PM – 2.30PM ET / 10.00AM – 11.30AM PDT
Free

Register now

#wpdiversityworkshops

Meetup Organizer Newsletter: August 2021

Hello friends,

Welcome to the August 2021 edition of the Meetup Organizer newsletter! We have some exciting updates for you in this edition of our newsletter – read on to find out more! 

Newsletter contents:

  • Returning to safe in-person WordCamps
  • Learn.WordPress.Org needs your feedback
  • Celebrate WordPress 5.8 with your Meetup Group
  • Online event updates
  • Tuesday Trainings
  • News from the WordPress world

🔙⛺️ Returning to safe in-person WordCamps

The Community Team has published a proposal to discuss how the WordPress community can return to in-person WordCamps. The proposal shares ideas on organizing small in-person events in areas that meet the in-person meetup safety checklist or with vaccination or testing freely available, following local safety guidelines with additional recommendations for organizing safe events. Please share your thoughts in the comments on that post

 👩‍🏫👩‍🎓Learn.WordPress.Org needs your feedback

The Training Team wishes to find what learners and potential learners would like to see in the learn.wordpress.org platform. To contribute, please fill out an anonymous survey (by August 13) OR join a short video call to share feedback.

❤️ Celebrate WordPress 5.8 with your Meetup Group

The latest and greatest WordPress release – WordPress 5.8, came out on July 20, 2021! This major release offers features like block-based widgets, a host of new blocks and patterns, a template editor, a duotone feature to stylize images, theme.json, and support for webP images, to name a few. Read more in the release post and the field guide

Celebrate the launch of this exciting release by organizing a local meetup for your meetup group or by generating buzz in social media. Check out this blog post on talking points for WordPress 5.8, along with the release field guide. You can also help by sharing release updates on social media using our social media pack. A slides template to adapt is also available on GitHub

Looking for inspiration? Several meetups are planning or have organized meetup events on WordPress 5.8. Check them out:

 🌍🎪 Online event updates

Reminder: You can organize in-person meetups for your group if your region meets guidelines in our safety checklist OR if your location has vaccinations or testing freely available – all you need to do is to fill out the safety checklist. You will find more details in our handbook. If it is not safe in your region or if you simply do not wish to organize in-person events, you can continue organizing online meetups for your group. You can make use of community Zoom accounts for your online meetups! Stay updated on online WordPress meetups worldwide by following the Marketing Team’s WordPress Meetup roundup every Monday.

Don’t miss WordCamp US on October 1!
One of the most exciting WordPress events – WordCamp US, is back as a single-day online event on October 1, 2021. Organizers of the event have several exciting plans in the pipeline, including networking opportunities, speaker sessions, workshops, and more. Call for speaker nominations is already open – and calls for volunteers and sponsors will be out soon. Follow the Camp website to stay updated on the latest event news.

Gear up for WordPress Translation Day Celebrations in September 2021!
The Polyglots Team is planning a month-long translation day celebration in September 2021, with two weeks of “core events” from September 17 to 30. The WordPress Translation Day team will announce more details on the event shortly, and you can follow all the latest updates on the Polyglots blog too. Want to participate? Join the celebrations by organizing a local Translation event for your meetup in September! 

Upcoming WordPress events 

The following WordCamps are already on the calendar. Don’t miss these events! 

Check out these WP Diversity speaker workshops for AMER/EMEA in August!
The Diverse Speaker Training group of the Community Team announced three new programs for Meetup and WordCamp organizers –  including a new Diverse Speaker Support program and an Allyship program. The team has some exciting workshops in the pipeline for August! Please share about these

🛠 Tuesday Trainings

Through Tuesday Trainings (#TuesdayTrainings), the Community Team publishes a different topic on the WordPress Community Blog to help organizers and interested community members learn various skills. Don’t forget to check out our other Tuesday Training posts this month:

🗞 News from the WordPress world


If you have any questions, Community Team deputies are available to help. Please send an email to support@wordcamp.org or join the #community-events Slack channel. Thanks for everything you do to grow the WordPress community. Let’s keep sharing knowledge and inspiring each other with our contributions! 

We will see you online soon!

The following people contributed to August’s Meetup newsletter: @evarlese @eidolonnight @meher and @webcommsat

#meetup-organizer-newsletter

#newsletter

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) on August 11, 2021

Attending: @jillbinder @ashiquzzaman @evarlese @onealtr @katiejrichards @danitto @wpfangirl @nalininonstopnewsuk @webcommsat

Start: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210901174057/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1628701305151200

Today we talked about:

  1. How are you doing with items you are working on for us?

2. Upcoming workshop: Allyship for WordPress event organizers.

3. Upcoming workshop: How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events AMER/EMEA with @onealtr and @volkswagenchick

4. Translations update

5. Marketing has asked if folks can help us please retweet & share:

http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210901174057/https://twitter.com/wordcamp/status/1425449729593384963

http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210901174057/https://www.linkedin.com/posts/make-wordpress-marketing-team_allyship-for-wordpress-event-organizers-amer-activity-6830971097387700225-CyZt

http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210901174057/https://www.facebook.com/WordCamp/posts/302599118322870

End: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210901174057/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1628704998225400

More details under the cut:

Show full post

  1. How people are doing with their items

@evarlese reviewed our Handbook page. She is also on track for helping with some outreach for the upcoming events/new programs.

@wpfangirl put the link for the Allyship workshop into the WP-Tonic Slack so she remembers to share it with the listeners on Friday.

@onealtr Getting ready for the workshops, attending and facilitating.

@nalininonstopnewsuk Let us know that the Allyship event has been shared on social media, in the marketing meeting, and Abha added it to the meetup newsletter. She and @webcommsat provided us some links to retweet and reshare (above the cut).

@katiejrichards finished sending notices to members of our working group who qualify for the Community contributor badge on their profiles and is going to look at editing the Handbook doc soon (to help shorten it and possibly also make it scannable with bullet points).

@danitto is ready for instructions on helping workshop participants troubleshoot joining our Slack channels. He is also working on looking for an easier way to communicate to participants how to join using the slides. @webcommsat reminded us that there are Learn videos on this and provided the link.

Danitto may also help us with upcoming meeting reminders. For Jill to follow up.

2. Upcoming workshop: Allyship for WordPress event organizers

We are having our first workshop in the new Allyship program on Thursday, August 19th, 2021! 5-7pm UTC.

http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210901174057/https://www.eventbrite.com/e/allyship-for-wordpress-event-organizers-ameremea-tickets-165331221133

We are asking everyone on our team to attend one of these workshops. It would also be great if anyone attending from our team can meet about 10 minutes before the start so we can all get on the same page quickly. I’ll send an “orientation” invite to those signing up in our team.

We are encouraging WordPress event organizers as well as any contributors to attend.

@danitto may be able to help with some of our background admin workshop items.

@webcommsat asked: Will it require a lot of bandwidth or is there an option for people to connect on the zoom workshop on audio only please? @jillbinder will look into this and reply.

3. Upcoming workshop: How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events AMER/EMEA

A week after the Allyship workshop, @onealtr and @volkswagenchick are holding one of our “interactive, transformational watch party” Diverse Speaker workshops. August 27th @ 5-7 (or 6:30 tbd) pm UTC.

For this, we are inviting people in WordPress from underrepresented groups and we are also inviting the participants of the Allyship program.

http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210901174057/https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-own-your-expertise-start-speaking-at-wordpress-events-ameremea-tickets-16612963320510:54

Help in the background will be welcome for this one as well, please.

4. Translations update

We think we may have the 3 Portuguese BR captions translators for the Diverse Speakers video!

We currently  have 1 Spanish (Latin American) translator. We have one more maybe, so we are looking for 1 or 2 more.

I will also be doing a call-out for a lead for the Translations team in our group. We really want it to be available all over the world in different languages.

#wpdiversity

Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup 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 Slack and ask for help!

Community Team Meeting Agenda for 2021-08-05

The Community Team bi-weekly meeting is happening this week. The meeting is meant for all contributors on the team and everyone who is interested in taking part in some of the things our team does. Feel free to join us, even if you are not currently active in the team!

Asia-Pacific / EMEA friendly meeting: Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC
Americas friendly meeting:
Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 09:00 PM UTC

Below is a preliminary agenda for the meeting. If you wish to add things you’d like bring to into discussion, comment below or reach out to team reps @sippis or @kcristiano. It does not need to be a blog post yet, the topic can be discussed during the meeting nevertheless. We use the same agenda for both meetings.

Deputy / Mentor / Contributor check-ins

What have you been doing and how is it going? What you got accomplished after the last meeting? Are there any blockers? Can other team members help you in some way

Tuesday Trainings:

Announcement, Invite, and Document Sprint

Diversity WG Updates

Proposals:

Open floor

Opportunity to bring things into discussions that weren’t on the meeting agenda and if anyone has something they would like to share with the team. If you have a topic in mind before the meeting, please add it into the comments of this post.

Hope to see you on Thursday, either on Asia-Pacific / EMEA or Americas friendly version of the meeting!

#team-meeting

Tuesday Trainings: If you deviate, communicate!

If there’s a question you’d like to see answered or a topic you’d like to see discussed, please share it in the comments or email support@wordcamp.org with the subject line Tuesday Trainings. Now onto this week’s topic.

This week’s question: What if I can’t follow through as expected?

I was talking with a colleague the other day about experiences we’ve had with people who couldn’t get done what they said they’d be able to get done in the amount of time they gave themself to do it. Not quite failing to do the thing, but certainly not doing a task in the timeline or manner that was expressed. Sometimes I can’t get something done when I say I will. Sometimes I just can’t get something done. And if my life experience has taught me anything, I’m not the only one.

And of course that can be frustrating for all involved, but there is a way to make it better. I just never had a catchy little phrase for it until I was talking with this colleague who is also a softball umpire. She said something in our conversation that I will never forget. One phrase that rang so true with me that I’m adding it to “I don’t know, but let’s find out” in its level of importance, simplicity, and usefulness. Today, I share her wisdom with you.

If you deviate, communicate.

It’s a simple statement. It’s an even simpler plan. If something isn’t going as expected, let someone involved  know. If you can’t get something done, let the stakeholders know. If you’re going to complete the project but it’s going to be late, let someone know. If something goes off track let someone know. 

We all get it. Sometimes things don’t work out as planned. There is nothing wrong with failure. There is something wrong with not communicating in the face of failure or change. Some folks are afraid to over communicate. I get that. Sometimes far too many words will just stream right out of me and before I know it I’ve said too much. That’s why this phrase resonated so much with me. Maybe it will with you too. 

Wrapping up

I said it before, but let me say it one more time, if you deviate, communicate. If you have tried and true suggestions for the best way to communicate when things go awry I’d love to see them in the comments.

And as always if you have any questions or topics you’d like to see addressed in this space let me know in the comments or by emailing support@wordcamp.org

#tuesdaytrainings

Proposal: Updating Community Team meetings

Few weeks ago, @kcristiano, @angelasjin and I began discussing our Community Team meetings, and how they could improve to foster more discussions and connections.

The Current Challenge

In short, we believe that there are too many meetings taking place at the moment and the format of those meetings are not catering to the Community Team as well as they could. To give you a hint where the problem lies, here’s a list of current Community Team meetings (not including working groups):

  • Community Team meeting every first and third Thursdays of month. Repeated twice on the same day to cater different time zones. Takes place in #community-team Slack channel. Meeting agenda consists mostly of going through published blog posts about current matters and important discussion.
  • Community Office Hours every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Takes place in #community-events Slack channel. Opportunity for community members and event organisers to ask everything from community deputies.
  • Deputy Office Hours every other week on Thursdays and Fridays. Repeated twice on the same day to cater different time zones. Takes place in Zoom. No agenda, more a space for deputies to talk about their work and related challenges face to face. This is a new thing that started in 2021.

The basic problem appears to be hat there are many meetings, but attendance and engagement is low. These meetings are mostly targeted for community deputies that are deeply involved with the team, and not for event organisers. That feels a bit skewed, as the Community team’s ultimate objective is to work to benefit the greater community.

The Proposal

To make Community Team meetings more interesting, helpful, easier to approach and attend, Angela, Kevin and I would like to propose updating our meetings! Instead of the meetings listed above, the Community Team would move to the following ones:

Community Team meeting

Once a month for anyone currently involved or who wants to get involved in the Community Team. Still repeated twice on the same day to cater time zones and taking place in #community-team Slack channel.

Shorter agenda, more open floor discussion and personal updates from community members. Highlighted blog posts at the end of the meeting instead of being in limelight and taking most of the time. We will encourage discussion in these meetings and link to the discussions on the agenda posts for those who cannot attend to review.

We are also hoping to record minutes for these meetings and post that to the P2 as well. A volunteer is needed to take the minutes.  This role can rotate, one need to make a long term commitment (but we’d love it if you did).

Community Local Organiser meeting

Once a month for WordCamp and meetup organizers. Repeated twice on the same day to cater time zones. Taking place in #community-events Slack channel.

No formal agenda. The purpose would be to become a place where local community organisers can share how their community is doing, successes and challenges, and learn from each other. Ambition is to bring local community organisers closer to each other as well as the community team, strengthening the connections.

Deputy and Mentor Chats

Once a month for all active Deputies and Mentors. Repeated twice on the same day to cater time zones. Taking place in Zoom. No formal agenda. Place for deputies and mentors to share their knowledge with each other and to talk about challenges encountered in our weekly work.

What do you think, would these new meetings make sense? Is there something that should be included in these meetings? Are some meeting types missing from the list?

Please share your thoughts and ideas by 2021-08-23 at latest.

#meetings, #team-chat, #team-meeting

Thank you @sippis @kcristiano and @angelasjin for this thoughtful post and ideas, I 100% agree with your sentiment about changing the current meetings and formats and this is the right time to do it as many people are on summer/winter holidays and we could start with the new meetings from September 🙂

I like the 3 new kinds of meetings and the fact that they are all once a month.

For everyone to get familiar with the dates/timings and remembering them better, I’d suggest to do something like this:

  • Community Team meetings: first week of the month (the date most voted)
  • Community Local Organiser meetings: second week of the month (the date most voted)
  • Deputy and Mentor Chats: third week of the month (the date most voted)

We, as deputies and mentors, could invite and encourage local Meetup and WordCamp organizers to participate in the Community Local Organiser meetings.

Let’s see how they go and let’s give them a chance, I love the ideas. And if I can dream about it, the Community Local Organiser meetings could evolve to zoom rooms in different languages (as many as the number of deputies/mentors available who speak different languages). But that’s something that we can try in the future with higher engagement 😉

Thank you for sharing this proposal, @sippis! I definitely support trying all of these changes – the adjustment seems like a helpful way to make the time we do spend together in meetings more meaningful.

Thank you for writing up this proposal, @sippis! 🙏 These are some excellent ideas. I like these ideas (especially the local community organizer meetings – which could perhaps pave way for a meetup organizer roundtable at some point?). I vote for experimenting with these modified timings and see how they work for our team!

This looks great! I love how this will help with some of my group’s challenges: how to communicate more directly with meetup & WordCamp orgs and with Deputies.

I like the idea of experimenting with meeting formats; the current formats have been in place so long, they’re probably a bit stale. I do like how easy they are to run, though. Less structured meetings are a little less easy to run; do you think we’ll have trouble finding people to lead meetings if they get less structured?

I definitely like and support these new ideas to refresh the team meetings! I share similar concerns as Andrea — will these meetings be more challenging to lead/moderate when the meetings have less structure?

Kudos for the suggestions to mix formats up a bit. I, for one, am more likely to volunteer facilitating a less structured meeting than one that’s tightly structured. (No surprise, huh?)

I support the timing ideas Rocio outlined:

For everyone to get familiar with the dates/timings and remembering them better, I’d suggest to do something like this:

Community Team meetings: first week of the month (the date most voted)
Community Local Organiser meetings: second week of the month (the date most voted)
Deputy and Mentor Chats: third week of the month (the date most voted)

As a meetup organizer, I’d propose a bit of structure for the organizer meetings, and that we should also ask the other organizers for suggestions. One thing that can work is a session where organizers can share pain points and difficulties, and one for “Here’s something we did that worked great” and one for speaker or subject recommendations.

Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup 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 Slack and ask for help!

  • Orientation and site set up for WordCamp Taiwan 2021
  • Website set up for WordCamp Prague 2021
  • Organized a discussion group on Introduction to Open source
  • HelpScout tickets, payments, WordCamp/meetup support – the usual.

Invitation: help me test an idea for organizer skills development?

I apologize in advance for the short notice here! I am taking a vacation in August, but didn’t want to lose momentum on this idea.

I’m going to schedule a few times to try out this idea for an Organizer’s D&D / practice scenarios session

If you are interested, whether you are an experienced organizer, or someone considering trying to organize a group for the first time… please comment on this post with the time/day they could join!

  1. 2300 UTC on 2 August
  2. 2300 UTC on 3 August
  3. 1600 UTC on 4 August
  4. 1600 UTC on 6 August

This will be a video call, in which I will give the group challenging scenarios, and ask you to come up with ideas for solutions you would try.

My goal for these meetings will be to test whether this idea might help WordPress organizers feel more confident when organizing events or communities — anyone, no matter what experience level you have in organizing, is welcome to join.

I’ll follow up as soon as possible with those who requested to join at the most popular times, and share a video link. If you can’t make it next week, don’t worry! This is just a quick “test of concept,” and if it’s successful, I’ll invite more people to help plan out a way to make this available to more people with more time to plan. 🙂

#experiment, #meetups-2

All right, friends, based on feedback we landed on these two times/days:

2300 UTC on 3 August
1600 UTC on 6 August

I’ll DM those who’ve said they’re interested, in Slack, with a Zoom link. There’s still time to “sign up” so if you’d like to join one or both sessions, please comment here!

I read through the scenarios. I am interested to hear how you get on. Unfortunately, I can’t make the times next week.

No worries, @grapplerulrich — thanks for looking through the scenarios, anyway! I hope we’ll be able to test this more broadly in the weeks and months to come!