Jon (Kenshino) 9:11 am on April 19, 2019  

Call for Organisers – WordCamp Asia

We’ve opened the Call for Organisers process at https://wpasia.org/call-for-organisers/

We’re looking for organisers with some experience and have set some guidelines to help everyone apply. We think it makes sense for community lovers fresh to WordCamp organising to start off via supporting their City WordCamps.

Diversity is our key focus: We’d like to include as many countries in this team as possible.

There are a few ways you can help with this effort:

  1. We’ve got a tweet going – so help us retweet please!
  2. We’ve also written up a draft announcement that meetup organisers can publish via Meetup’s email tool.
  3. Sharing this post on Social Media and directly to community organisers you know
  4. Encouraging all the awesome people to apply

Like any other WordCamp, we need to select a lead organiser who will fill out the application for WordCamp Asia. For those who missed it – we wrote a proposal for this effort and you can read about it here.

(Forgive us for the website with no-design, we’d rather spend effort on the actual WordCamp website)

Hugh Lashbrooke 3:17 pm on April 18, 2019
Tags: ,   

The Get Involved table at WCEU 2019

Do you love contributing to WordPress? Do you love telling other people about how much you love contributing to WordPress? Would you like those people to start contributing to WordPress themselves? Then do I have the opportunity for you!

tl;dr: Sign up for one or more Community Volunteer shifts at the WCEU 2019 Get Involved table here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PAts7eeSKYcBgI-NmLMWBj70_utBFjwq5uVXPTxieWE/edit?usp=sharing (note that there are 2 tabs in the sheet – one for each day).

If you’ve been to WordCamp Europe or US before you’ll be familiar with the Get Involved table – it’s a central location (an actual physical table) where attendees can find out more information about contributing to WordPress. The table is staffed by community volunteers, and we aim to have it staffed by at least one person (but preferably more) from the start of registration to the end of the final session on each day of the WordCamp, not including Contributor Day.

People working at the Get Involved table simply need to be able to explain how WordPress contributions work and help people find a good fit in the project for their particular set of skills.

What we’re looking for here is for community members to sign up for volunteer shifts at the Get Involved tables for WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin. We have split up the two conference days up into 1-hour shifts to make things easier and it would be great to have a selection of people from across the project (not just the Community team) involved here.

The schedule and sign-up sheet is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PAts7eeSKYcBgI-NmLMWBj70_utBFjwq5uVXPTxieWE/edit?usp=sharing – simply add your name to the white blocks in the “Community Volunteers” columns for any shifts that you would like to take. Note that there are 2 tabs in the sheet – one for each day. You can reference the event schedule to make sure you don’t miss any sessions that you particularly want to attend.

+make.wordpress.org/docs +make.wordpress.org/support +make.wordpress.org/meta +make.wordpress.org/updates

#get-involved, #wceu

Courtney P.K. 12:20 am on April 18, 2019  

2018 Meetup Survey

The 2018 Annual Meetup Survey results for each chapter meetup group are being sent to organizers directly, but we’d also like to share some statistics about the program, as well as interesting findings from the survey with everyone!

WordPress Meetup Chapter Statistics in 2018

As of 31 December, 2018…

  • Total WordPress chapter meetup groups: 691
  • Total countries with chapter meetups: 99
  • New meetup groups joined the chapter: 166
  • New members joined: 106,409
  • Total members: 385,250
  • Total number of organizers: 2,061
  • Total number of events: 5,675

2018 Meetup Survey Participation

  • Total member respondents: 912
  • Total organizer respondents: 112
  • Total countries participated: 70

Interesting Findings from the Survey

  • Overall most people are pleased with the meetup program, but there is a desire for more variety both in topics/difficulty and in the scheduled time of events. See the post of Organizer Best Practices for some tips that you can use in your community!
  • Member location: 54% of respondents live in the city that their meetup group is hosted in. Only 3% of attendees travel far to attend a meetup event.
  • Factors that affect the decision to attend events: 19% of attendees said the posted topic is the most important aspect. Whether an event has food/refreshments is important to only 1% of respondents.
  • Days/times that would make it easier for members to attend: 24% of respondents said they prefer meetup events on weekdays, and 34% prefer evenings.
  • Types of events: 16% of respondents prefer formal presentations with a speaker followed by Q&A, 15% of respondents prefer workshops or trainings, and 12% of respondents prefer discussion groups.
  • 38% of respondents have never contributed to the open source project! Perhaps this is your opportunity to host a contributor day for your meetup group. 🙂

Read on for more detailed results!

Continue reading →
Jonathan Bossenger 2:18 pm on April 17, 2019  

Meetup Organiser Newsletter emails

Recently, in discussions with a few meetup organisers, I’ve discovered that it appears that Meetup Organiser Newsletter emails are not being sent to all persons assigned as meetup organisers.

  • The first person who was assigned as co-organiser of our Cape Town meetup (besides the WordPress user) does receive the newsletter
  • Myself and another co-organiser do not, and have never received these emails.
  • This was brought to light when, in a separate discussion in a WordPress related Slack, another meetup organiser indicated he has also never received the meetup organiser newsletter.

We put quite a bit of effort into the monthly newsletters and if folks are not receiving them, it could pose a problem. For example, if we use the newsletter to highlight discussions around guideline changes (eg the recent logos in slides guidelines, which was discussed in a previous post) and meetup organisers are not receiving these emails, they may feel left out of the decision making process.

I’d like to propose a little investigation into this, perhaps by emailing a selection of recent meetup organisers via our HelpScout instance, and determining how wide spread this problem is. Once we can determine a) if there is a problem and b) where it lies, we can look into resolving it.

I’m happy to move forward on this, if it is something the community agrees we should look into. I’m also open to suggestion as to the best way to achieve this.

Hugh Lashbrooke 10:31 am on April 17, 2019  

Community Team Chat Agenda | Thursday, 18 April 2019

Hello Team!

Our bi-monthly Community Team chat is happening this Thursday, 18 April 2019. Meeting times are detailed below. We use the same agenda for both meetings in order to include all time zones.

APAC / EMEA friendly: Thursday, April 18, 2019, 11:00 UTC

Americas friendly: Thursday, April 18, 2019, 20:00 UTC

Deputy check-in

What have you been doing and how is it going?

P2 posts needing review/feedback

Highlighted P2 posts

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

Hugh Lashbrooke 10:08 am on April 16, 2019  

Financial Management Docs for do_action Charity Hackathons and Intro to OS Workshops are now Live!

Last month, we posted about using Open Collective for managing the finances for WordPress Foundation events – specifically do_action charity hackathons and open-source workshops.

The setup work for that has been done and the documentation has been written. A big thank you to @mariaojob and @usmankhalid for their hard work with writing the documentation!

This all means that going forward, finances for do_action charity hackathons and open-source workshops will be managed through Open Collective – this will make it much easier for organisers to request funds, receive sponsorship, and to pay vendors. It will also make sure that the budgets for each of these events are fully public and transparent.

You can check out the WordPress Foundation host page on Open Collective here.

You can read the documentation for organisers here.

In addition to the Open Collective documentation, we have fresh guidelines for what sponsors of WordPress Foundation events can receive.

If you are organising (or planning to organise) a do_action charity hackathon or open-source workshop, please read all of this documentation carefully as this is will be how all of these events will handle finances from here on out.

Vedanshu Jain 10:06 pm on April 15, 2019  

X-post: Next WordCamp.org ticket scrub on April 18, 2019

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/meta: Next WordCamp.org ticket scrub on April 18, 2019

WordCamp.org 4:00 am on April 15, 2019
Tags:   

Weekly Updates

Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup 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 Slack and ask for help!

Sandy Edwards 1:31 am on April 15, 2019
Tags:   

Recap of the Kids Event Working Group Chat | Thursday 11 April 2019

Attending: @ErickaBarboza @melindahelt @stephanieBrinley @ChrisChristoff

Start: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1555016427356000

We Covered

  1. Updates of Documents Created
  2. Concerns about Vetting Volunteers
  3. Translations/Editing

Updates on Documents Created

@ErickaBarboza knocked out translating the entire doc template.

Also, @kimberly.lipari got the art project/ice breaker documentation completed. So it is ready for editing!

The goal is to spend about 12 months creating, documenting and polishing the documents and then creating a handbook on the https://make.wordpress.org/community/ site for all organizers to easily access.

https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/WordPress-Workshop-for-Kids-organiser-kit–AZQlFlZU7eZKdGm_j7OFHj2bAg-kxmOjjycWysa3jFYoaBTv

Concerns about Vetting Volunteers

The question is from @sbrinley “Although we ask all our volunteers to abide by the general code-of-conduct, it seems like it would be good to have a code-of-conduct specifically for KidsCamp volunteers. A few policies/guidelines on how to interact properly with children and whatnot.

Also, I’ve been pondering what a secondary vetting process for KidsCamp volunteers would look like.”

melindahelt [5:10 PM]
On the one hand, I see the point of having a tighter code of conduct, but since WordCamps are to be family friendly events, every volunteer/speaker/session should all follow the same guidelines.

On the legal side, I suppose that may differ by location and also based on if the parents will be attending with the kids in the same room.

sunsand187 [5:11 PM]
I agree… I will be working with the deputies to make sure we are good and don’t need something more specific.
I feel like the overarching message in our current CoC is pretty solid, but it is not overly clear on some things like language.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments for further discussion.

Translations and Editing

We still need editors and researchers. If you know anyone who is good with hunting down legal research and making legal speak sound human or if you are good with editing documentation we could use your help.

Please comment if you are available to edit and/or do some research.

Project Management Information

So I know a lot of people expressed interest but not everyone made it to todays meeting. I am sure more people will be getting involved over time. I did create a Trello Board so that we have some jumping off points for anyone to just dive in and start on micro pieces.

https://trello.com/invite/b/GryYJ7P9/0a44a78f320c0eb04013fa193b0663ce/wordpress-kids-events-planning

End: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1555017643374800

Next Actions

  1. @sunsand187 Will Document the recent WCMIA 2019 events into the new template.
  2. Team, Look over Trello and this post to stay up to date and provide feedback. https://trello.com/invite/b/GryYJ7P9/0a44a78f320c0eb04013fa193b0663ce/wordpress-kids-events-planning
  3. @chrischristoff is helping put a survey together.
  4. @sunsand187 is going to break the template up into smaller pieces.

Next Meeting is Thursday, 25 April 2019, 2100 UTC/ 5pm EST. This chat will occur in the Make WordPress Community-Team Slack channel.

#kids-events
Andrea Middleton 5:42 pm on April 11, 2019
Tags: leadership,   

Organizer best practices: paths to leadership, or 11 ways to help your local meetup

As you all probably know, the global community team recommends a flat organizational structure for local WordPress community groups. Because open source projects depend on a large, diverse group of contributors to collaborate and iterate quickly, we encourage that community organizers “always be recruiting” (and welcoming, and training) new leaders.

When there are lots of people with leadership experience in a community, local organizers can take more breaks and avoid burnout. As new leaders join the community, they bring new ideas, perspectives, and methods. Because organizers tend to organize for people like themselves, recruiting a diverse group of leaders is especially important — so that the community can take into account a broader spectrum of backgrounds, needs, interests, and lived experience.

OK sure but how?

Most people are on board with the *idea* of a large, diverse leadership team but struggle with recruiting. And that’s not really a surprise! Not all organizations are as open to new leaders as ours, so even constant repetition that “we’re always looking for more organizers” at every meetup event might not result in people stepping forward.

One way to make the recruitment process more gentle and perhaps less intimidating is to offer a gradual path to leadership. Many groups have found success with inviting people to help out with smaller, accessible tasks at first. Small contributions can lead to more complex jobs as the volunteer’s confidence and understanding of the group continues to grow.

Here are 11 ways to contribute to your local WordPress meetup, which can also serve as a graceful path to community leadership:

  1. spread the word about the meetup (sharing photos on social media, word of mouth, flyers, blog posts, etc)
  2. greet & welcome new attendees
  3. take attendance (if your group keeps a record of who actually attended the event)
  4. deliver opening or closing remarks (easier if the points to cover are written down)
  5. facilitate a round-table discussion
  6. give a presentation
  7. help find a free venue
  8. record & post a presentation to WordPress.tv
  9. organize refreshments
  10. suggest or recruit speakers
  11. organize an event series

Add to the list

Community organizers, speak out! What can meetup members do to help your group thrive, which aren’t listed above? What does the path to leadership look like in your home community?

Once we collect as many examples as possible, we can create a new Meetup Organizer Handbook page to share these suggestions with current and new Meetup organizers. Please share your ideas and experiences in a comment on this post!

#leadership, #meetups-2