Hi WordPress Community!

This year, the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) had to adapt the way we  work given the changing landscape.

Prior to 2020, we were teaching meetups how to run our workshop for their communities themselves. In the past two years, we’ve trained over 50 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 to run the workshop, and those that ran it saw a major increase in the diversity of 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 lineup. 

Given the events of 2020, we started delivering portions of the workshop to the community directly ourselves, online. We also ran a handful of meetup training sessions to meetups who reached out to us, and some of those groups ran the workshop. We’ll provide a full report of our results later this year, but so far we have reached 236 participants across 87 meetups around the world!

Now, we are taking a 20,000 foot view to re-imagine the work we are doing again, and invite your input.

Given the world changes this year, and ongoing changes in 2021:

1. What would be the most impactful way to help organizers get more diversity in WordPress speaker lineups? (not just gender, but also race, class, sexuality, ability, age, etc.)

2. What new barriers do you see coming out of 2020 that are likely to be factors in 2021?

We are looking for your ideas by December 18th. Please reply to this post with any thoughts.

Thank you @angelasjin and @andreamiddleton for helping with this post.