The Community Team Quarterly Report: January-March 2016

Can you believe it’s April already? It’s been a busy few months for everyone on the Community Team, but we didn’t want to let the month slip too far away before giving you an update on all the exciting things that have happened since January!

WordCamps

As is common in the first quarter of the year, January through March saw a certain amount of organizing activity and a huge passel of teams getting their plans together for events later in the year.

Nine WordCamps were held between January and March (4 in the Eastern region, 5 in the Western region), with a total of nearly 4,500 tickets sold. The biggest event in this period was 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. Miami, with three days of events and over 1,000 attendees, closely followed by WordCamp Atlanta, which sold 928 tickets.

Hold onto your hats for the next quarter! We have 24 WordCamps currently scheduled for the April-June period, 12 WordCamps on the schedule for Q3, 2 WordCamps scheduled for Q4 (including WordCamp US), and 31 WordCamps that have been approved for pre-planning. With WordCamp applications coming in at an average rate of 13 per month, it’s very likely that we’ll see more than 100 WordCamps in 2016.

MeetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook.

The WordPress meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. chapter account grew by 40 groups between January and March, with a total number of groups on the chapter account clocking in at 249 (up from 209 groups at the end of 2015). There were 589 meetup events in the first quarter of the year, and the total number of members across all groups on the chapter account is currently 93,225. With more groups added to the chapter account every week, this program is growing by leaps and bounds!

Community Team

We introduced some major logistical changes to the program at the beginning of this year, switching the legal and financial entity behind official WordPress community events from the WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org. to a new corporate subsidiary of the Foundation, WordPress Community SupportWordPress Community Support WordPress Community Support PBC is a Public Benefit Corporation, created specifically to be the financial and legal support for WordCamps, WordPress Meetup groups, and any additional “official” events organized within the WordPress Community Events program., PBC. This shift allowed us to introduce new, less restrictive rules for sponsorship that we hope will make WordCamps and meetup events easier for our amazing volunteers to organize.

As of April 1, WordPress Foundation stopped accepting sponsorship income for WordCamps. If you’re a sponsor, please change your payee for WordCamp sponsorship to WordPress Community Support, PBC.

With these logistical shifts, the Community Team also introduced some new tools to help make sponsor invoicing and vendor payments/organizer reimbursements easier to manage. These tools make it easier for organizers to invoice sponsors and easier for 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. to process income and payments. It’s been a huge timesaver already, which is already opening up more time for our experienced volunteers to spend mentoring WordCamps and working on new programs.

Speaking of new programs, our other exciting announcement this quarter was about our newest experiment: the WordCamp Incubator. We plan to announce the locations of the first incubator events before the end of this month, so stay tuned!

Thanks to all of our amazing volunteers, who put their valuable time, energy, and brainpower toward making the WordPress community an amazing place to be! We can’t wait to see what the rest of the year brings.

#community-management, #meetups-2, #wordcamps