Have you ever had trouble getting women to speak at your events? Us too.

Did you know that there’s a solution this? There’s no one perfect solution, but there is a speaker training workshop written by and for female members of the WordPress community. (http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200211163545/https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/speaker-training/) It busts through women’s typical objections, like “What would I talk about?” and “I don’t know enough about … to give a talk on it.” The training runs through exercises (and public speaking practise opportunities) for finding a topic, crafting good pitches, bios, and outlines, and covers tips to becoming a better speaker.

This workshop has been tested and proven to increase the number of women speakers at meetups and WordCamps in Vancouver, Seattle, and Montreal.

Where do you come in?

We’d like to form a group of passionate folk to run and promote this fantastic workshop. We want everyone to know that this resource exists, and that anyone can pick it up and run it. It’s been designed so that the facilitators don’t need expertise; they don’t even need to be experienced public presenters themselves. The course is all written out in a script that trainers can just read the material aloud, along with accompanying workbooks (coming soon).

Interested in joining this Diversity Outreach Speaker Training working group? Together we will: (each item is optional)

1. Train you to run the workshop. (The first time, you will be a workshop participant in a live online version. There may be possibilities to receive the training in person, such as at WordCamp US 2017 on Contributor Day).
2. Receive and then, in turn, provide ongoing support and mentorship to run the workshop.
3. Help you train others to run the workshop. We want many trainers worldwide in a self-perpetuating system that is continuously growing.
4. Promote the workshop globally and help create a promotion plan.
5. Be part of a team that decides how the workshop should change over time.
6. Discuss ongoing speaker diversity issues and how we can solve them. We will be focusing more on solutions than on just talking about problems.

Currently this effort is being mostly lead by myself, but the goal is to recruit a group to take long-term leadership in achieving the above goals. I’m available to spend about 6 months training folks and then hope to pass this on, though that is flexible. Even after that time, I will always be available to answer questions and provide support.

Estimated time commitment:

• A bi-weekly group chat: 30 minutes every 2 weeks [Update: We meet on the #community-team Slack channel every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, 5pm UTC, for 30-60 minutes]
• A live training: 1.5 hours + 1 hour of group chats over the course of a couple of weeks + 0.5 hour wrap-up
• Prepare and run the workshop: Running the whole workshop takes 4 hours, but you can run just a module for 1 hour. Expect about 2 hours prep time the first time.

If you’d like to take part in this working group please comment on this post. I will then reach out to interested folks, to find a good time for biweekly meetings. Other people can join in any time after that as well. If you have questions, please also feel free to comment on the post. I look forward to working with you and together creating something wonderful!

#wpwomenspeak