Next Steps

It’s been great watching the dozens of responses on the first post come in — for all our occasional snarkiness or family squabbles, we really have an awesome community, so seeing how many are ready to pitch in and make it even better is truly inspiring.

So! What now? There are a BUNCH of things around events that need to happen. Many have been in planning stages for years, some since even before my time, and just need some talented people to commit some time to it. A problem we tend to have in the WordPress contributor community (and I’m one of the guiltiest) is being so excited about all the cool things we could do that we overextend ourselves and wind up not making progress as quickly as we could if we each focused on one project at a time. To that end, I’ll ask that of the many potential avenues of contribution I’m about to list as places you can volunteer to help, just pick one for now. Pick the one that has you the most excited, the one for which you think you have the most relevant experience, the one that you know you have the time and energy to make happen in a timely manner, whatever. Assignments to projects will not be permanent, and you can change where you contribute your energies at any time, of course. But for this opening salvo, if you can try to only volunteer for one thing (and to make it something that you’re willing to commit to through whatever milestone/timeframe is identified in the description post), that would be great.

Here we go with some of the first round of projects that can make a big difference to people who want to organize official WordPress events. For each thing, let’s start with a group of 5 volunteers to get it started, then open it up to general participation. If way more than 5 people volunteer for a particular project, Andrea will pick 5 of them to get it rolling (smaller group size = quicker conversations and faster progress getting to the open-to-all general participation stage with excitement/momentum still in place).

Projects for the Events Contributor Group

I or Andrea will post on each of these projects today in separate posts (to keep track of comment/volunteer threads more easily), so for this particular post, try to keep comments specific to calling out projects you think should be represented on this list in the first round rather than the listed projects themselves (make those comments on the individual posts that will be published throughout the day today).

In the individual posts we’ll outline a description of the project, experience required to be in the initial volunteer group, and anticipated length of project/time commitment. You might want to wait to see all of them before volunteering for one. And remember that all of these projects will be open to anyone for contribution after a brief initial project kickoff by these smaller groups to get a plan or proposal in place, so if you’d rather not make a time commitment now you also can contribute more casually as each project moves into the general participation phase.