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