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 13, 2020 at 10:20 UTC

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.

Cami Kaos 10:20 pm on March 13, 2020  

Online Conference Organizer Training

Howdy Deputies and Organizers! We’re excited to announce that next week we’ll have three 1-hour training sessions with Brian Richards on the use of both Crowdcast and additional tools for use with organizing and presenting online conferences.

Each one-hour session will cover different topics, so you’re welcome to attend as many as you’d like. In addition to sharing this information with organizers via the calls, our big goal is to write documentation based on this information for our handbooks to support organizers moving forward with online only events.

If you can’t attend the trainings synchronously, you can still help with writing the documentation for organizers by watching the videos which we’ll post as soon as possible.

Our first session will be held Tuesday, March 17 at 1400 UTC / 11am EDT / 4pm CET

Session 1: Running Events in Crowdcast
* Creating an event in Crowdcast (title, description, cover photo, url, registration button, privacy settings)
* Editing a multi-session schedule
* Outbound streaming via RTMP
* Customizing the email messages
* Importing attendees
* Inviting speakers on-stage
* Sharing screens, apps, and tabs
* Using CTAs, Polls, and Q&A
* Chat and Attendee Moderation
* Embedding Crowdcast
* Embedding Captions
* Exporting video recordings

Our second session will be held Wednesday, March 18 at 1400 UTC / 11am EDT / 4pm CET

Session 2: Helping speakers and emcees prepare for a virtual audience
* Think of the learner
* A/V considerations (share Crowdcast setup link)
* Preparing your environment (lighting, sound, background)
* Imagine a real person in the room
* Speak with enthusiasm
* Sharing slides vs sharing screen
* Keep slides clean and concise (imagine them at 240p resolution)
* Pre-record all demos
* Schedule either a rehearsal or an A/V test within Crowdcast
* Facilitating Q&A

Our third session will be held Thursday, March 19 at 1400 UTC / 11am EDT / 4pm CET

Session 3: Working with pre-recorded content
* Risks and limitations with pre-scheduled content
* Tools and recommendations for pre-recording content
* Preparing a recording for live re-broadcast
* Uploading content to restream.io
* Scheduling content in restream.io
* Getting an RTMP feed link from Crowdcast
* Changing the output feeds in restream.io
* Monitoring stream output for issues
* Contingency planning for schedule changes or playback issues
* How to reset a session in Crowdcast

Check out this video and sign up to learn more and be prepared to start on time next week.

Again, the goal of these training sessions is to create documentation for our handbook to support our 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 as they move forward with online events.

If you’re available to help create documentation please let us know which session(s) you’re able to attend and take notes on.

Organizers are also welcome to attend these sessions and they will be made available for all once they’re completed.

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

jillbinder 4:30 pm on March 12, 2020
Tags:   

Question for the community: Diverse Speaker Training Group (#wpdiversity) 2019 Year-End Report

2019 was quite a year!

First, we had goals in 2019 that we came close to meeting but did not quite hit. As the goal is 25 meetups/WordCamps run our workshop from May 1, 2019 – April 30, 2020, we are breaking that down to say 15 run it between June and November 2019.

We had 10 meetups run it in 7 countries. It should be noted that our number was quite close to Jan-Dec 2018, where we had 12 in 6 countries.

The places that ran it, as far as we know, are:

Canada
– Vancouver (ran it twice)

India
– Ahmedabad

Italy
– Torino
– Verona

Portugal
– Lisboa
– South Africa
– Cape Town (Ran workshop on diversity that was heavily inspired by ours)

Spain
– Sevilla

USA
– Houston
– Oakland
– Seattle

It is a challenge to know which places ran it. Most of these were self-reported to us and we followed up by confirming that they had 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. Some, however, were ones that we found ourselves by looking through all of the meetup events that were run in 2019.

It is quite possible that we are missing more. Particularly ones we may not have found who have events in other languages, so they would have been missed in our search through the meetup events.

We definitely want to count everybody. Who did we miss? Please comment on this post to tell us!

During this time, we accomplished more than our original goals.

There were other major items that went through months of thorough, detailed revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. from folks from different underrepresented groups:

  • Lead and created with a team a new, important workshop for the Community Team: Creating A Welcoming and Diverse Space (Created for WCUS)
  • Created 2 important handbook docs:
    1. Building a Diverse Speaker Roster
    2. Inclusive and Welcoming Events

We focused heavily on improving our processes that are necessary before doing the workshop on a larger scale and we achieved great results:

Improving the Attendance Rate of Our Train the Trainers Sessions:

  • 2018 – Very low attendance & didn’t let us know they weren’t attending
  • 2019 – A near-perfect attendance rate, telling us in advance if they were not attending!

Improving the rate of meetups/WordCamps who run the workshop after taking our training:

  • 2018: 28%
  • 2019: 83%!

Who did we miss? If you think other groups have run the Diverse Speaker Training workshop in 2019 that we missed, please comment on this post.

#wpdiversity

jillbinder 11:58 pm on March 11, 2020
Tags:   

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#wpdiversity) on March 11, 2020

Summary: We talked about what people are working on, the 2019 year end report results, what our team should do in the face of COVID-19, the call out for financial support for meetups running our work, and our new tracking sheet.

Continue reading →

#wpdiversity

Aditya Kane 5:56 am on March 10, 2020
Tags: ,   

2019 Incident Reports – Details and Results

The Community Team receives incident reports via the incident report form, dedicated email address, and sometimes through direct reports in person or 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/..

The incident report response procedure is detailed here. This is the process that’s currently followed when a complaint is sent to report@wordcamp.org or via the incident report form.

In 2019, a total of 18 reports were received.

Here are descriptions of the type of reports received in 2019, the method of reporting, and the action taken after investigation into each report.

  1. A report was received on 1 January 2019, in which 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. organizer reported a deputy for false accusations of requesting extra money for their meetup.

    Action Taken: A mediation between the two individuals took place with checks done on required funds. The organizer and deputy were both asked to respect the expectations around the meetup venue grants.
  2. An event organiser was reported for misappropriating global grant funds from 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. they organized. It was discovered while compiling the financial transparency reports for the event in January 2019.

    Method of Reporting:     Emailed reports and discussions from event co-organizers.

    Action Taken: The individual received a life-time ban from official involvement at all official WordPress community events. Additionally, they received a 1 year ban from attending any official events. Recovery of funds is expected to be done over 6 months by the end of February 2020, otherwise a report with the local financial fraud authority will be filed.

    Public Discussion: Incident report: Misappropriation of WordCamp funds
  3. A report that the organizer of an official event could be misappropriating global grant funds was received on 24 January 2019.

    Action Taken: Community deputies researched using the transparency report from the event, with additional information collected from social media. With the lack of transparency, the reported individual was asked to refrain from organizing WordCamps and Meetups in the future.
  4. A report was received on 18 February 2019, of an organizer asking an attendee to refrain from attending a local meetup for 3 events. The report came from the attendee who was asked to refrain from attending.

    Action Taken:     A community deputy researched the allegations and checked with both reported organizer and attendee who had complained. Research about the incidents and messages by reporter revealed that the pause to attending events was required. The reporter was asked to respect this pause for 3 months.
  5. A report was received on 23 February 2019, outlining verbal harassment and comments which were unwelcoming. These comments were reportedly made on several Facebook groups by a Polyglots translator.

    Action Taken: A deputy mediated discussions with the reporter and the reported person. The deputy also reached out to a Polyglots teamPolyglots Team Polyglots Team is a group of multilingual translators who work on translating plugins, themes, documentation, and front-facing marketing copy. https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/. rep, who then clarified to the reported person the expected behavior as part of the translation team.
  6. A report was received on 8 April 2019, describing verbal harassment and unwelcoming behaviour by an attendee at an event.

    Action taken:     A community deputy reached out for mediation and collected facts from all parties. The reported individual was asked to refrain from attending official events for a period of six months.
  7. On 22 May 2019 a report was received about possible misuse of WordPress brandname by an attendee at a local meetup group.

    Action Taken:     A deputy reviewed the complaints and answered questions by the reporter about possible irregularities found. The reporter was then pointed in the right direction of reporting a trademark violation.
  8. A report was received on 27 May 2019 about an individual being removed from being a co-organizer of a chapter Meetup group. It was filed for mediation by a deputy.

    Action Taken:     The organizer who was removed did not want to move further with mediation as long notice was taken of it.
  9. A report was received on 29 July 2019 from a designer of Wappu art complaining that an event was using their artwork without permission.

    Action Taken:     A deputy checked in with both the designer and the event organizer. The artwork was licensed under GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples. v2 and hence the event could use the artwork. After mediation, the organizer reached out to the designer and reporter agreed the issue was closed.
  10. A report was received on 20 August 2019 from a WordCamp organizer who reported an attendee for sending two volunteers repeated, unwanted messages. The two volunteers did not want to file a report themselves.

    Action Taken:     A co-organizer of the event approached the individual and asked them to refrain from such behaviour in future events. The reported individual agreed to follow the rules and be more mindful of their behaviour.
  11. An emailed incident report and complaints along with conversations with deputies about reporting a deputy for behaviour which was disrespectful, divisive while undermining the community team goals by gatekeeping.

    Result: The individual was asked to refrain from involving themselves as a Meetup and WordCamp organizer and from any other official role at official WordPress events for one year by a review board.

    Public Discussion: Incident report: Deputy asked to step away from official roles
  12. A report was received on 12 September 2018,  which reported the organizer of a meetup group for over charging for venue assistance with the meetup.

    Action Taken:     Community team deputies checked with the organizer and also emailed the venue about over-charging. After information was found that the charges were more than what were ordinarily needed to organize meetups at venues in the area, the funds request for the group was declined.
  13. During a conversation with a deputy, an attendee reported incidents from previous WordCamps they attended. The attendee was asked to file an incident report.
    As a follow up a report was received on 9 October that detailed verbal harassment at official events.

    Action Taken:     A deputy reached out to the reporter and discussed all the events in detail. A working group reached out to the reported person who did not confirm or deny the incidents. The reported individual has been asked to refrain from attending official events (chapter meetups and WordCamps) for a period of 24 months.
  14. A report was received on 1 November, which detailed an anonymously written violent threat to an individual at the local meetup group. The reported person has had a previous history of harassing this person at non-WordPress meetups.

    Action Taken:     A deputy reached out to the person reporting and requested the person being threatened to file a police report and follow up with the community team to share the police report. The reporter confirmed the individual being harassed has filed a police report and a restraining order has been filed against the reported individual.
  15. An attendee reported an individual of making them uncomfortable by getting too close to them and speaking to them aggressively, while being in an inebriated state at an after party. This was also witnessed by two event organizers.

    Action Taken:     The reported person was informed about their inappropriate behaviour. The deputy who was physically present during this interaction then filed a report on 3 November to keep a record of the incident.
  16. A deputy was informed in person at an event about verbal harassment by a deputy towards organizers of a WordCamp in November.

    Action Taken:     The deputy guided the organizers to go about filing an incident report.
  17. Another report about the same reported individual from Report 5 was received in December 2019, outlining verbal harassment and comments which were unwelcoming.

    Action Taken:     A deputy reached out to the reporter and collected information about the comments. The deputy has advised the reporter to collect more information including screenshots to facilitate a proper review or investigate the matter further.
  18. A report was received on 26 December 2019 about an attendee being reported for physical and verbal harassment to several attendees at a WordCamp. The reporters were deputies who were present at the event.

    Action Taken: Deputies and community members reached out to the reported individual to ask them to refrain from such actions in the future. The individual was also informed that if similar incidents were reported, they could be asked to refrain from attending official events.

#code-of-conduct, #report

Andrea Middleton 6:43 pm on March 9, 2020  

Discussion: Safe and welcoming events in the WordPress community

Recently there’s been some discussion about how inclusive spaces are affected when someone wears a hat featuring “MAGA,” an acronym for the US political slogan “Make America Great Again,” to 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.. Aaron Jorbin posted about this first, and it seems time to hold a courteous and respectful discussion on the topic inside our team.

The WordPress global community team asks community organizers to create events that are safe and welcoming for all attendees. We do this because WordCamps and meetups exist to connect WordPress enthusiasts and inspire people to do more with WordPress — and it’s difficult for people to connect or get inspired if they don’t feel safe. 

Our methods for creating welcoming events include:

  1. Setting clear behavioral expectations with participants, by sharing our code of conduct online, in the event registration flow and in opening remarks
  2. Addressing behavior that doesn’t meet expectations promptly, using a “calling in” approach
  3. Refraining from hosting events at religiously- or politically-affiliated venues.

Our program has very clear guidelines about what kind of behavior we expect but rarely sets expectations around what attendees might choose to wear to a WordPress event, or what iconography is allowed on belongings. For example, while we do not hold events in houses of worship, we do not ask attendees to refrain from wearing religious symbols or clothing to WordCamp. This line of reasoning falls apart when it comes to widely-recognized symbols of hate, like Nazi iconography. I think we definitely would ask someone to remove a Nazi icon from our event spaces if they brought one in, on their clothes or laptop.

That said, I think all event organizers would like to avoid attendees being surprised, either by a reaction to what they’re wearing/displaying on their belongings, or by what someone else is wearing or displaying on their belongings. 

Over the years, this program has had better results by defining what we would like to happen than by defining all the things we don’t want to happen. We have found that creating more rules tends to require us to make even more rules, to close loopholes and clarify. The fact that this is a global program, with events held in over 100 countries around the world, further complicates the creation of effective and prescriptive rules. 

Join the Discussion

WordPress community organizers, please help discuss this question: How can we keep the inclusive and collaborative nature of our events, without specifying what can and can’t be worn to WordCamps and meetups?

This may be a difficult issue to discuss with calm and courtesy. Please do your best to express yourself kindly and assume good intent among those who are sharing their perspectives on this sensitive topic. I’ll leave comments open until March 16, or until we need a cooling-down period.

Timi Wahalahti 3:19 pm on March 9, 2020  

WordCamp and Meetup application vetting sprints – March 2020

We currently have a backlog of 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 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. applications. We would like to request the help of all deputies to help us stay responsive to community members, and to help keep our queues moving forward. To that end, we’ll be holding few vetting sprints 🙂

Each sprint will last for two hours, and we will collectively vet as many WordCamp and Meetup applications in that time as possible. If you are a deputy and would like to coordinate a sprint at another time, then please comment on this post and I’ll add it to the list.

All deputies are welcome and encouraged to join! Please comment on this post if you think you can take part.

What is a Vetting Sprint?

A vetting sprint for WordCamp or Meetup applications is a scheduled session where all available deputies meet together in the #community-team channel channel in the WordPress 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/. group. Over the course of the sprint, we will all work on vetting applications and use the Slack channel as a central place to discuss what we’re working on and support each other.

Who can take part?

Any deputies who have access to the 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. listings and/or the Meetup central listings can take part. That means people who have completed the deputy training, signed the deputy agreement and been given access to the dashboard.

If you are a deputy who has been active in the last year, then you should have access to this. If you don’t have access and still want to take part, please comment here or ask in #community-team channel and we’ll sort out your access.

How Does it Work?

We will be going through the open WordCamp and Meetup applications that still need vetting – you can find WordCamp listings here and Meetup listings here. We also have some handy notes to help you with the vetting process.

As always, deputies can work on these things at any time that suits them, but these dedicated sprints help to provide some direct, focused time for it.

#vetting-sprint

Angela Jin 3:01 pm on March 9, 2020  

Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship for WordCamp US 2020

The WordPress Foundation will once again offer the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship. Kim was a valued and committed contributor to the WordPress 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. project, and this is the WordPress Foundation’s way of honoring her memory. This scholarship will be awarded to one woman-identifying WordPress contributor who has never attended 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. US before, and requires financial assistance to attend.

The Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship provides travel assistance so that the recipient can attend WordCamp US, including travel from the recipient’s home city, hotel stay for the duration of the event, and a ticket to WordCamp US.

To be considered, please apply no later than Friday, May 29, 2020 at 12 am Pacific.

For more details, please visit the WordPress Foundation’s About the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship page.

Click here to apply for the scholarship.

WordCamp.org 4:00 am on March 9, 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!