Rocio Valdivia 11:58 am on October 4, 2019
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How to contribute to the Global Community Team

These are some of the different options for getting involved with the WordPress Global Community Team 🙂

1) The best way to start is by organizing Meetups and/or WordCamps in your city. If you feel like you can represent WordPress, follow the code of conduct for WordPress events, and follow the five good-faith rules for WordPress 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. organizers, then you can apply to join the program: 

  1. a) Check if there is a WordPress Meetup group in your city – if there is one, join it, attend the events, and step up by either helping the organizers or becoming an organizer yourself!
  2. b) Check if there is a WordCamp in your area – you can attend, apply to speak, volunteer, sponsor and/or help organize your local 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.!
  3. c) If there is not an existing WordPress Meetup group (or if there is an inactive group) in your town/city and you want to start one, you can apply here – you’ll receive a reply within a couple of weeks.

2) If you already have experience organizing a successful WordCamp and have an availability of 2-3 hours a month, you can apply to become a WordCamp mentor here: – you’ll receive a reply within a couple of weeks.

3) If you have had at least 1 year of experience as a Meetup organizer and/or have been a WordCamp lead organizer, you are familiar with the WordPress Open Source project and philosophy, you have at least 2-3 hours a week available for contributing, and you accept our Code of Conduct, you can apply to become a Community Deputy. We are a team of community-minded people around the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at 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.. You can apply to join the Global Community Team as a deputy here – you’ll receive a reply within a couple of weeks.

Note: if you have any additional questions, join us in the #community-events channel of Make WordPress Slack, we’ll be happy to help you there!

#contributors

Andrea Middleton 12:27 am on March 5, 2020  

New organizer recommendations due to epidemic-based uncertainty

As you probably all know by now, the COVID-19 epidemic has resulted in multiple event cancellations and will likely continue to affect WordPress community events for the months to come. 

While it still seems appropriate to continue to organize local WordCamps and events in areas unaffected by the outbreak, it’s also prudent for us to plan our events with the possibility of cancellation in mind. 

Therefore, I’d like to announce some new, hopefully temporary, recommendations for 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:

  1. When reviewing vendor contracts (venue, catering, swag, etc), please pay special attention to cancellation terms and cut-off dates. Share those dates with the entire organizing team so that if it becomes necessary to consider cancelling or postponing an event, money-related deadlines are front and center.
  2. For vendor contracts with scheduled deposits/payments, I’d like us to simply pay venue deposits on the schedule outlined by the contract. In the past we’ve paid these in one lump sum to decrease the number of transactions, but reducing the financial risk associated with cancelling or postponing an event should come first right now.
  3. Publish a page on your WordCamp website, with up-to-date information about any special measures the organizing team will take to ensure attendee health, and what sources of information the team is monitoring to assess risk.
  4. If your team is struggling with making a decision about whether to continue with a planned event, please reach out to community team deputies via support@wordcamp.org for advice and support. You’re not alone!

If you have any concerns about these new recommendations, please comment on this post — if you have any suggestions for additional recommendations, please share those as well! 

Hugh Lashbrooke 8:23 pm on March 4, 2020  

Researching livestream infrastructure and support

In light of the COVID-19 epidemic, several WordCamps have decided to either cancel or postpone. As mentioned in Josepha’s recent post:

We should do our part, as members of a highly connected global community, to limit the spread of the virus while there are still so many unknowns.

For those organisers who are considering canceling or postponing their upcoming 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. 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., deputies are currently researching how to provide infrastructure and support for livestream alternatives, available for all WordPress community organising teams.

While a livestream can’t replace the way a meetup or WordCamp helps create in-person connections, online events will allow WordPress enthusiasts to continue sharing their knowledge and bringing people together in that way.

This research will be much more efficient if organisers can share some feedback on the following questions:

  1. What training or documentation do you think your organising team would need, to effectively plan and/or convert to an online conference?
  2. What ideas do you have about how we can help attendees of an online conference connect in a meaningful way?

Please share your thoughts, concerns, and ideas in a comment on this post!

Is your WordCamp already trying to make this difficult decision? Reach out to your mentor or a member of the global community team via support@wordcamp.org with any questions you have.

Angela Jin 10:32 am on March 4, 2020
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Proposal: Financial support for venues for Meetups that run the Diverse Speaker Training Workshop

A common challenge that faces WordCamps around the world is the lack of diversity in speakers, specifically speakers who identify as women or from other underrepresented groups. To address this, the Diverse Speaker Training working group (#wpdiversity) has worked hard to refine and promote a series of hands-on, effective lesson plans, and to train 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. organziers to run the comprehensive workshop in their local WordPress meetup. These workshops are geared towards empowering women and underrepresented groups in tech to speak at WordCamps by:

  • Addressing impostor syndrome and common deterrents to speaking
  • Helping individuals find and refine a topic
  • Helping future speakers create their title, pitch, bio and talk outline
  • Discussing tips to becoming a better speaker
  • Offering participants a chance to practice public speaking
  • Helping to build confidence

The Diverse Speaker Training working group is happy to share that this workshop has made a difference in increasing the diversity in speakers at WordCamps. Since the program began, over 20 workshops have been run around the world in 9 countries. Their 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. speaker lineups typically go from 10% or fewer speakers from underrepresented groups to 50% or more!

For more information about the Diversity Speaker Training Workshop, please visit this link. 

One of the obstacles that meetups have shared with us in trying to run the workshop is the issue of finding a venue that they can afford. In order to make this Workshop even more accessible to all meetups, we propose that each meetup receives up to $250 USD to help support costs associated with running this workshop, which can be used for covering the cost of the venue as well as some light snacks and refreshments. Similar to the Meetup Venue Approval Request, the meetup group must also meet the following conditions: 

  • Your group is on the WordPress chapter account at meetup.com.
  • Your group is currently following the 5 good-faith rules.
  • You are unable to find a donated venue.
  • Your proposed new venue meets minimum requirements for safety, adequate seating, and 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).

Similar to regular meetup venues, please also avoid venues with religious or political affiliations. Since one of our jobs as community organizers is to create a 100% welcoming space for everyone, we avoid holding events in venues where someone might feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. This is particularly important for the Diverse Speaker Training workshop.

In receiving this financial support, the meetup community would also need to do the following:

  • Complete the training for running the workshop with the Diverse Speaker Training group
  • Share a link to the scheduled workshop
  • Provide invoices or receipts showing the requested amount
  • Complete the post-workshop questionnaire
  • If a WordCamp is planned or held later on, report back on speaker diversity after the WordCamp. This can be done in the post-WordCamp questionnaire

Next Steps

We would like to hear your feedback on this proposal! Do you feel like helping WordPress groups increase the diversity of their meetup and WordCamp speaker lineups would be a good use of WPCS funds? Do you think the suggested amount is appropriate? Please share any thoughts you may have by Wednesday, March 18, 2020.

Joost de Valk 8:01 pm on March 3, 2020  

Proposal for WordCamp site’s SEO fixes

People searching online should be able to find 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., by searching for that WordCamp’s name at the very least. Unfortunately at the moment, Google isn’t even indexing some of our WordCamp sites. See this example, for WordCamp Torino. You won’t be able to find it in Google. Or this, for the already past WordCamp Glasgow. We need to fix this.

Why isn’t Google indexing these sites?

We are not blocking Google from accessing these sites. The problem we have is that Google treats each of these subdomains as a separate site. And since it’s a subdomain of a subdomain it doesn’t deem it very important. In technical terms, it’s a matter of crawl budget. Each site, because they’re each different subdomains and thus new sites, has to gather enough links for Google to deem it worthy of indexing. 

Honestly, the solution is very simple to explain (albeit probably a fair bit of work to implement): instead of making a new subdomain for every year of every WordCamp, we should switch to the extreme opposite of the model. We think https://2020.torino.wordcamp.org/ should become https://wordcamp.org/torino/2020/. In fact, it would be even better if we could make https://wordcamp.org/torino/ the homepage, all the time, of that WordCamp, with sub-pages having the year of the event in the permalink. Previous years homepages could then live on https://wordcamp.org/torino/2019/ etc.

The homepage of WordCamp.org should be what is now https://central.wordcamp.org/. The result of this would be that every WordCamp in the world benefits from every other succesful WordCamp, in terms of reach, links, etc. It could still be a multi-site, all these WordCamps could still have their own themes, style, etc.

This is as “simple” as flicking the switch and creating redirects for these sites, so the old version 301 redirects to the new. I’d prefer for those redirects to be handled serverside as this is going to be creating a fair amount of them. I’m fairly positive that within months of doing this we’d suddenly see all those new sites indexed.

Speaker pages

Right now, every camp has to create new speaker pages for all their speakers, even when a lot of these speakers speak on more than one WordCamp. How about we turn it around: we tie sessions on WordCamp sites to profile.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/ pages. 

More SEO

There’s more SEO to be done on these sites, much more, and I honestly would not want to do that without an SEO pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. As you may know I am the original author of Yoast SEO and I’m thus very biased on what would be the best plugin for these sites. I think it’s best fit for this purpose and we’d love to invest the time needed into fixing all the other SEO things that need fixing, of course after discussion with the team. But that’s for later. First, let’s get these subdomains rolled into one main domain.

Mary Job 4:18 pm on March 3, 2020  

Community Team Chat Agenda | 5 March 2020

Hello Team!

Our bi-monthly Community Team chat is happening this Thursday, 5th of March 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, March 5, 2020, 11:00 UTC

Americas friendly: Thursday, March 5, 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/2020/02/24/wordpress-meetup-organizer-newsletter-february-2020/ – Covers diverse Speaker Training Workshops, 2019 Annual WordPress Meetup Member Survey, Grow your meetup tips for organisers – from WCUS and the news on Visual Composer being a 100% GPL-Licensed Plugin!
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/02/25/forming-the-wordcamp-central-twitter-account-working-group/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/02/26/recap-of-the-diverse-speaker-training-group-wpdiversity-on-feb-26-2020/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/02/27/youth-event-working-group-formerly-kids-chat-agenda-thursday-27-february-2020/
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/02/28/event-cancellation-guidelines-and-procedures/ – A discussion in light of the COVID-19 (corona virus)
  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/02/camptix-ticket-form-accessibility-improvements-changes-to-html-structure/

Highlighted P2 posts

  • https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/02/19/changes-in-meetup-organizer-application-form/

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

Kelly Dwan 6:01 pm on March 2, 2020
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CampTix Ticket form accessibility improvements, changes to HTML structure

There are changes coming to the ticket selection table, order summary, registration form, and edit form to improve the 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) of registering for 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.. The changes will deployDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. tomorrow, March 3rd, around 16:00 UTC.

Right now, most form fields didn’t have an “accessible name”, instead the form relies on the table layout to show which question corresponds to each input. This only works for sighted users— for anyone using a screen reader, the form fields are functionally unlabelled.

After this change, all inputs will have labels attached, so screen readers and other assistive tech will be able to connect the questions (for example, First Name) to the text input for the answer. This also changes some of the markup, which might affect your WordCamp’s style, if you have any custom CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site..

  • All ticket questions are now wrapped in a label element
  • All inputs have a unique ID (but this should not be used for styling)
  • Questions with multiple answers (radio buttons or checkboxes) now have their answers wrapped in a fieldset

The ticket selection table has also been updated so navigating through selecting a ticket is easier.

  • The quantity dropdown now uses the ticket name as the label
  • The ticket name is now wrapped in a label, instead of strong, and that table cell is now a th instead of td.

This fixes 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. ticket #1591, you can see the full changes on the GitHub PR. Please check your tickets page, especially if you’ve done any custom styling to it, and let us know in #meta-wordcamp on 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/. (or here in the comments) if you see anything unexpected.

#camptix

WordCamp.org 4:00 am on March 2, 2020
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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!

Cami Kaos 7:12 pm on February 28, 2020
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Event Cancellation Guidelines and Procedures

Given the unfortunate crisis we find ourselves in with COVID-19 (corona virus) we’ve seen as many 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. cancellations this month as we would ordinarily see in a full calendar year. Being mindful that the question of when to cancel, and what to do if cancellation is required, is on the minds of many organizers I’d like to start collecting some information on and common questions you might have around cancelling/postponing an event so we can add them to the WordCamp Organizers Handbook.

We have some existing documentation on procedures followed for WordPress Community Support which we’ll publish along with an FAQ and other guidelines.

I know @courtneypk and @sippis have a lot to add to this conversation, I invite everyone to chime in as well.

While ordinarily we would wait until a call for feedback has been completed to add an update like this, in this case I hope you all agree we should add this documentation as soon as possible and update as necessary.

Please share feedback and concerns in the comments!

#community-events #wordcamps

Sandy Edwards 5:40 pm on February 27, 2020
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Youth Event Working Group (Formerly Kids) Chat Agenda | Thursday 27 February 2020

Our next Kids Events Working Group chat is happening Thursday, 27 February 2020 at 1900 UTC/ 3pm EST. This chat will occur in the Make WordPress Community-Team 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/. channel.

This chat occurs every 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month. Asynchronous chat will be noted in the minutes up to 12 hours after the chat occurs so feel free to chat when it is convenient for you.

Agenda

  1. Updates from the month
  2. Goals for next month
  3. Open Floor Discussion

Come and discuss how you can be involved. We need people to:

  • Research – laws surrounding minors at events globally
  • Writing – arts and crafts documentation, WordPress basics documentation, Parental Resources Documents
  • Editing – grammar, spell check, and general flow proof readers/editors

Everyone is welcome. Please attend even if you are not sure how to participate.

If for any reason you can not attend the meeting live but still want to be involved please comment on the post to introduce yourself. Share a bit about your WP background and what area you want to help with.

Please leave a comment below of anything else that should be added to the agenda for discussion.

#kids-events, #youth-events

Josepha 2:29 pm on February 27, 2020
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X-post: Daylight Saving Time Meeting Planning

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