Rocio Valdivia 7:23 pm on November 3, 2016
Tags: community ( 16 ), summit ( 2 )

WordPress Community Summit 2017

As you might have read already, the 2017 WordPress Community Summit (CS) will take place a few days before 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. Europe 2017 in Paris, France (final dates to be determined).

What is the WordPress Community Summit?
Unlike the main WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. conference, which can have as many as 3000 attendees, the Community Summit has historically been an smaller, discussion-based event. Active contributors to WordPress, the open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project, gather to discuss and work on issues that the WordPress project faces.

The purpose of the Community Summit is to hold face-to-face discussions about issues or subjects that are difficult to discuss online. The last three summits have used an unconference format, without slides, pre-selected speakers, or planned presentations. Because of the format and the goals of the Summit, it’s necessary to cap registration at a much lower number, and to that end the past three events have been invitation-only.

Challenges in past events
Because the purpose of the Community Summit is to hold face-to-face discussions about issues that divide or challenge us as a cooperative community, it’s necessary to limit the number of attendees to ensure that true discussions can happen. In the past, we made sure that key voices were heard by sending invitations to specific people.

Unfortunately, this can create an air of exclusivity around the Summit, and many people assume that anyone who attends the Summit is a more valuable contributor than those who aren’t invited or don’t attend. This can reinforce an “in-crowd/out-crowd” paradigm that the WordPress project works to avoid.

Proposal: a new approach for 2017
If we have to limit our attendance to have productive, collaborative discussions at the Summit, then choosing the participants becomes a challenge if we don’t know what the teams are going to discuss ahead of time. Therefore, this year I suggest we try something new:

Let’s ask teams to decide on the challenging, controversial, or sensitive issues they want to discuss at the summit before the summit is held. Then, once the teams know what they want to talk over in person, they can nominate and select the people needed to represent all points of view in each of those discussions. This way, the event stays small, hard topics get discussed, but the selection process is more transparent and functional.

Here’s how I think that could work:

1) Each make.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ project team creates a list of relevant topics/issues which are relevant for the progress of the team and the WordPress open source project as a whole, prioritizing topics or tasks which are sensitive enough to specifically require in-person discussion.

2) Each team rep will post their final discussion topic list on the Community Summit blog: https://make.wordpress.org/summit/. Deadline: December 20th

3) After this, each team will decide on a group of representatives to attend the Community Summit (not determined yet, and depending on the team), with selections based on several factors, including: providing representation of a wide, diverse range of opinions (based on the agreed-upon topics selected by each team), diversity, inclusion, and activity of the contributors.

4) Each team rep will post their list of participants as a comment to a dedicated post which will be used to wrangle the attendee list on https://make.wordpress.org/summit/.

5) Of the above list of participants, each team will select two participants who are willing to help with the organization of the event: posts, communication, travel assistance, finding sponsors, etc. The intention of this approach is to propose a more open and team-focus Community Summit with transparent participation from all active contributors and reps of each team. This way we can hopefully anticipate barriers and cross-team difficulties that might come up, and avoid them.

Safe Space
One of the things that made the first summit a unique experience was that it was named a safe space, protected from photos, tweets, blog posts quoting people, etc. This allowed participants to have very candid conversations without people worrying about how their words might be taken out of context later online, or about looking bad if they got into a heated argument for a change instead of tiptoeing around a topic. It also meant that people put their devices away and were 100% present in the conversations. The goal of the summit was to be very candid and blast through community issues, and being distracted by devices or worrying about someone tweeting what you said wouldn’t have been conducive to that. We’ll have a similar privacy request this year, and will ask anyone signing up to agree to it.

Diversity
One of the things organizers of the first summit tried to do when issuing invitations in 2012 was to create a participant group with diverse points of view. A travel scholarship program helped to bring people who might not have been able to afford the trip. Our community has grown more since then, making it even more important to include diverse voices in a summit of leaders and doers. To that end, we’ll be trying to provide travel assistance this time again. Our hope is that in addition to bringing contributors who are financially constrained, we can bring more people from the groups that tend to be underrepresented at events like these.

Note: It’s not the purpose of this post to discuss any logistics or implementation details of the event, that will be handled later in the year and in coordination with the WCEU logistic team.

Do you have thoughts, concerns, or suggestions about this proposal? Please share them in the comments!

#community, #summit

Aaron Jorbin 8:06 pm on November 3, 2016

> each team will decide on a group of representatives to attend the Community Summit (maximum 10-12 per team for the reasons mentioned above),

I think this is a ridiculously low number of people for a couple of the teams and will hamper rather than help the process in addition to hurting perception of the project. As a project, we already face criticism that decisions are made by few people and that there is an us vs them situation.

Let’s take the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team as an example. Just looking at core committers, 29 individuals have committed code so far in the 4.7 cycle. If we limit it to the 12 most active, we wouldn’t have maintainers of: Updates, Default Themes, The Editor, REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/., or media. It also wouldn’t include any of the 6 lead developers nor does it help develop the next generation of contributors.
- Rocio Valdivia 11:59 am on November 4, 2016
  
  Hi @jorbin, thanks for your quick feedback. This is just a proposal and I understand perfectly your concerns about the number mentioned in the post. I agree about that number is too low, specially for some teams, and I’ve updated the post for a better approach.
- Andrea Middleton 3:55 am on November 5, 2016
  
  Not arguing for the now-redacted proposed number of team representatives, but I do think that if we switch the determining factor on the summit’s attendee selection from “who needs to be there to work out any possible issue that comes up” to “who needs to be there to work out these pre-determined issues,” we might indeed end up with some active contributors giving the summit a miss, and I think that’s ok. The point of the summit is to work out stuff face-to-face that is really hard to work out online, and it’s difficult/slow to have participatory discussions in a group of 30+ people.
  
  Now, if a team ends up with a list of hot topics that don’t have a lot of “stakeholder” overlap, then I think we’ll definitely see more folks from some teams than others. Which won’t mean that some teams are more important than others — it’ll just mean that the various lists of folks working stuff out might not coincide as well in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. as they do in support, for example.
  - Jon (Kenshino) 7:05 am on November 5, 2016
    
    Must teams work as a whole together? I imagine if we have 5 topics and some topics are project-based, the project team members could very well do their own discussion.
    
    It’s not dissimilar to how George had his 2FA workgroup during the summit last year.
    
    So the total team size might not actually be an issue here.
  - Aaron Jorbin 7:16 pm on November 8, 2016
    
    I absolutely agree that not every active contributor from a team needs to be there and that smaller is generally better than larger. I mostly felt that the now redacted hard limit was too low and would force issues to not be discussed.
    
    In my eyes, some of the biggest wins from previous summits has come from cross team work. For example, the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. policy on A11YAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) that came out of the 2015 summit, required both core team members and AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) team members.
Jon (Kenshino) 11:52 pm on November 3, 2016

I don’t think you should be setting a 10-12 maximum limit for any of the teams. As it is, this is an invite-only event and an arbitrary number doesn’t help.

Also, Dec 20 is much much too early. Most of us are preparing items to talk about or work on at WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.’ contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. and that will be our primary focus for now.

Why December 20? Sounds rather arbitrary again, the summit is in June. Do the topics need to be known 6 months ahead of time? I rather think we should be spending more time getting the topics out in a proper manner.
- Rocio Valdivia 12:14 pm on November 4, 2016
  
  Hi @kenshino, that’s a good point!
  In fact, it was not an arbitrary date, the suggested deadline for posting the topics is before xmas, because that way, each team would be able to work on the selection of the contributors in the new year. As the idea is to involved those two representants of each team willing to help with the organization of the event asap.
  Hope this clarifies the suggested deadline. Any suggestions for that date?
  - Jon (Kenshino) 7:03 am on November 5, 2016
    
    Posting the topics before Christmas wouldn’t actually give us any real advantage since team meetings would likely be postponed all the way till at least the first week of 2017.
    
    Besides, as mentioned a few of the teams are likely too busy to discuss such topics all the way up till WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.. I imagine the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team is pretty busy with 4.7, the Docs team with the REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. docs etc.
    
    After WCUS, that would effectively give us 2 weeks to discuss important topics which is rather short.
    
    In my opinion, giving the teams at least until the end of January to work out the topics (if not February) would make a lot more sense.
    
    The likely 2 two participants who are meant to help organise – would likely be key members of the team and would be there either way. So they could very well be identified early on and need not wait for a full submission of the topics to start working on tasks to help with the organisation.
Petya Raykovska 7:39 am on November 10, 2016
Hey Rocio, thank you and the community team for this detailed proposal, it’s great these things are now discussed publicly. A few comments:

Topic selection deadline:

The community summit is not just a place where team members meet to interact with each other. It’s where different contributor teams meet and discuss topics with other teams as well. Example: 80% the needs and the development the Polyglots teamPolyglots Team Polyglots Team is a group of multilingual translators who work on translating plugins, themes, documentation, and front-facing marketing copy. https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/. needs to achieve in the next 5 years depend entirely on the metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team. We, as the Polyglots team, can propose 5 topics to discuss during the community summit (we already have our roadmap) and for at least half of them, we won’t be able to reach any positive outcome unless the meta team is there. I believe the same is valid for a lot of other teams. It makes the deadline for submitting topics a bit hard to meet as it requires coordination between teams.

Travel scholarships

>Note: It’s not the purpose of this post to discuss any logistics or implementation details of the event, that will be handled later in the year and in coordination with the WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. logistic team.

Be that as it may, previous experience has shown people need to know what investment they’ll need to make to participate. Europe will still mean travel for 99% of the people. This part needs to be thought through and figured out before teams start nominating members. Otherwise, it can get uncomfortable for a lot of people who won’t be able to afford to join.

Team members participation in organising

>Of the above list of participants, each team will select two participants who are willing to help with the organization of the event: posts, communication, travel assistance, finding sponsors, etc

What happens if none of the team members has the availability to join the summit organising team? Should that really be a requirement for team members who are already volunteering their time contributing to their own team? Shouldn’t the community team publish a call for community summit organisers instead like the WCEU team did? I feel this will be a more appropriate approach.

A could of other questions
- Who’s leading the community summit organising team this year?
- Can the community summit have sponsorships? In what way? I know the 2012 summit did but the 2014 one didn’t.
- How did travel scholarships in 2014 work?
- Don’t you think the number of people from each team should depend on the size of the team in general and how many people are essential for certain discussions?
- Some teams have subteams. @Jorbin already mentioned coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. where there are featured projects that have their own dedicated teams. Shouldn’t they get 5 topics themselves instead of being a part of the core team?
Thanks again for starting the discussion and proposing the new approach!
- Andrea Middleton 11:04 pm on December 6, 2016
  
  I agree that cross-team conversations are a valuable part of a summit. Maybe we could ask teams to identify those topics ahead of time as well; what do you think?
  
  Shouldn’t the community team publish a call for community summit organisers instead like the WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. team did?
  
  That’s an interesting suggestion! Just to clarify — the summit was first developed by Jen Mylo and has been organized by community team members in the past, but our team doesn’t want to “own” the summit. I think the suggestion of having team reps from each team working together to organize the event was to share the responsibility as well as the authority over the event. If there are teams that don’t have anyone who could contribute as an organizer, we’d have to figure something out — and maybe that’s an open, application-based recruitment like WCEU has done in the past, I can see how that could work.
  
  Who’s leading the community summit organising team this year?
  
  I think we might still be trying to figure that out. 🙂 But I bet it depends on how we agree to envision the event.
  
  Can the community summit have sponsorships? In what way? I know the 2012 summit did but the 2014 one didn’t.
  
  No reason why not. In 2014, WCSF supported the event financially; my understanding is that WCEU17 is able to provide venue and catering for the 2017 summit.
  
  How did travel scholarships in 2014 work?
  
  If you mean “where did the money come from,” it was a combination of surplus funds from WordCamps that year and money from the WCSF14 budget. If you mean, “who decided who came and who administrated the program,” then we had an application process for people who wanted financial support (here’s the post), and then Jen and I qualified applicants based on the criteria published. We mostly reimbursed flights (though we bought a few outright) and paid for accommodations directly. It was a LOT of work. A lot. Much work.
  
  Don’t you think the number of people from each team should depend on the size of the team in general and how many people are essential for certain discussions?
  
  Speaking for myself, yes with the caveat that there are some teams that are bigger than others (cough, coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., cough, community) and I think those teams shouldn’t choke out the other teams.
  
  Some teams have subteams. @Jorbin already mentioned core where there are featured projects that have their own dedicated teams. Shouldn’t they get 5 topics themselves instead of being a part of the core team?
  
  I mean, probably? I think we’re all trying to be fair to everyone while keeping in mind that there’s only so many people we’re going to fit in the space, you know? Core could very easily make up the entire participant base, or half of it — is that appropriate? Maybe Core thinks so and Documentation doesn’t, I’m not sure and I’m not trying to start fights. We will probably end up with a solution that makes everyone a little bit unhappy, as usual. 🙂 How do you think we should decide the participant number question?
toscho 9:43 am on November 10, 2016
I am not sure which team feels responsible for this topic, or if there is one that fits at all … so I’ll just leave this here as a suggestion:

There are multiple support communities: the .org forums, WordPress Stack Exchange (75k), Google Plus (80k), IRC, Facebook. I think they could help each other better. For example, when someone asks for a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party on WPSE, we send them (sometimes) to the Google Plus community (I’m a moderator in both communities). But there is so much hidden potential on all sides.
- A search engine for developers that covers .org and WPSE.
- Promoting important events on WPSE and Google Plus, not just .org.
- Maybe more interaction between the community moderators to avoid sending people to a round trip (yes, I have seen this happening).
Could that be a topic for the summit?
- Jon (Kenshino) 5:36 am on November 14, 2016
  
  Perhaps one of the topic should be
  
  How can these Support Communities work together (including us working on W.org)
  
  Copy @macmanx
  - James Huff 6:01 am on November 14, 2016
    
    That would be cool, I’d love to work towards at least a proposal for better cooperation between the various support venues.
John James Jacoby 3:57 pm on November 10, 2016

The summit is intentionally a somewhat exclusive event, though I can’t recall someone who felt like they deserved an invite that wasn’t extended one. Even BuddyPress & bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. team members have been invited in the past, though that was largely from those projects being employed across the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ network.

Given the increasing number of invitations and contributors, I agree that more preplanning is probably a good thing. The more there is to do, the more there is to miss, and FOMO is a real thing when you’re surrounded by the top influencers in your community, making decisions that will directly impact a future you’re trying to help build also.

I think as events naturally become larger, partitioning things back down into smaller, easier to manage chunks starts to be attractive. The irony is that everyone’s measure of success is typically growth, and the WordPress Contributor Summit has certainly grown in size exponentially over the years.

Instinctively, I think it might be too close to the 2017 summit to consider changing (or creating new) rules. Announcing the date earlier this year has meant that many people have already been thinking about what next year will look like, and no matter what the changes are, it’s not likely they’ll be very well received because people already started dreaming about their week of European bliss.

Maybe we can attend the 2017 summit with a mindful eye on what we’d like to change for 2018, considering what smaller, more focused summits may look like for 2018 and beyond? We can approach 2017 from the angle of being more inviting to people who really want to double down on any specific issues and goals, while simultaneously not restricting access to anyone for any reasons, and everyone can understand that going forward, if being a “top contributor” matters to them, they need to up their game so there are no doubts the value they’ve provided.

One of the obvious problems (of probably many) with the above idea of smaller team-oriented summits, is the increasing cost of travel & needing to do so multiple times per year if you’re ambitious enough to want to be involved in several areas of contributing. If that’s a blocker for us, maybe the summit needs to have a pretty strict schedule prepared months in advance so people can plan what days/hours are important to them, and that schedule needs to have clear goals. (This also goes against the post-it-notes-on-the-wall, fly-by-night approach of previous summits, but it does help more people navigate a fun week that’s growing increasingly complicated.)

I like that we’re trying to be more open about what future summits should be. I wonder if you’d get more effective feedback with a poll or form. “What did you like?” “What didn’t you like?” “What suggestions do you have” type of thing… I *think* this data might already exist from previous years, but I’m not positive.

fwiw, I hope to see all of you at many summits to come. They are extremely productive times, full of energy and abuzz with happiness between old & new friends, excited about making a positive impact however they can.
- Josepha 4:37 pm on December 7, 2016
  
  The summit is intentionally a somewhat exclusive event, though I can’t recall someone who felt like they deserved an invite that wasn’t extended one.
  
  In the types of projects where we generally feel that “built by those who show up” is true, the idea of invitation-only show-up privileges is problematic. Not hearing complaints is not the same as an absence of complaints, though I’m sure that’s not what you are implying here. As someone who didn’t necessarily feel like she “deserved” to be at the first Community Summit she went to, I discovered that my experience and voice would be an asset to teams I didn’t even know existed. Those random happenstances are important.
  
  Instinctively, I think it might be too close to the 2017 summit to consider changing (or creating new) rules.
  
  That’s a great concern to surface. Most WordCamps start this process right around 6 months ahead (though I know there is more planning and complex people wrangling in this case). Are you thinking that people may have already been planning to come to the Community Summit and might be surprised by a newly suggested way to identify attendees?
  
  I like that we’re trying to be more open about what future summits should be. I wonder if you’d get more effective feedback with a poll or form.
  
  Yea! Changing along with program changes is important. There was a poll that went out after the 2015 summit. There had been plans to survey people who had been to multiple summits, but it seemed like it might be worth an open call like this to get some feedback.
Brandon Dove 4:59 pm on November 10, 2016

I would challenge the following statement about the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. principals of the Community Summit:

>Active contributors to WordPress, the open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project, gather to discuss and work on issues that the WordPress project faces.

The first community summit came about by having participants from all areas of WordPress. This included bloggers, service oriented business people, pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party and theme developers, core developers, and more. WordPress is such a largely utilized piece of software that if we were to limit it to just active contributors, we’d miss out on 90% of the discussions about it.

In the past couple of summits, it has felt more like it was more a meeting of teams. I don’t think it was what the original intention was, or should be. Someone please correct me if I’m alone in this, but I feel like the summit was initially meant to figure out how we can bridge gaps in the community, how we can move the project forward to increase percentages of use, and to foster cross pollination between people from different teams. I’m not saying that hasn’t happened the past few times, but it has felt more like we’re in team-based silos.

If we want to have WordPress contributor team 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., we should do that separately from the Community Summit. We’re currently trying to make both types of things happen at the same event and I believe that’s why we’re struggling with how to move forward.

I do agree that ironing out time for specific topics is a good thing so that the summit can be productive, but I also think we should leave some time for topics that fall outside of the main to do lists. I feel like confining discussion too much will reduce the chance that we have those collision moments between members of different walks of life that generate new sparks for the WordPress project.

From my understanding, the first year of the community summit was largely nomination based. You had to basically campaign to get people to nominate you to go. While there were some folks that were going to be invited regardless, the nomination process helped us to highlight people with something to contribute (that might not have already been contributing officially). In addition, since others were potentially nominating them, we got the sense that their voice wasn’t necessarily just loud, but other people believed the way that they did as well. Hearing those voices is important to the project for a couple of reasons. If they are just loud and not constructive, it’s a way for us to quiet them by letting them be heard and affords us the opportunity to get to the root of their problem. It also offers an opportunity for those new voices to become active contributors in the project, bringing new ideas with them.
- John James Jacoby 7:56 pm on November 10, 2016
  
  I like how you highlight the differences between a “Community Summit” and “Contributor Team 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.” here. They do feel like different meet ups, with different intentions, goals, and likely audiences & attendees.
  
  And you’re correct about the first summit and it’s attendees and nomination process, at least in my experience and memory.
- Andrea Middleton 10:34 pm on December 6, 2016
  
  the summit was initially meant to figure out how we can bridge gaps in the community, how we can move the project forward to increase percentages of use, and to foster cross pollination between people from different teams.
  
  You are not wrong. I agree with this but I would add one more goal: to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts.
  
  If we want to have WordPress contributor team 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., we should do that separately from the Community Summit. We’re currently trying to make both types of things happen at the same event and I believe that’s why we’re struggling with how to move forward.
  
  I could not agree more. The Community Summit as pitched above is not meant, imo, as an event that includes contributor team working days. Whether or not we need contributor team working days is another discussion, and not one we should try to decide in this thread.
  
  I liked the nomination-based system we used in 2012, for the same reasons you mention here. The only problem with it, I think, was that it still depended on an assumption that the people who ended up there would be talking about the problems that teams needed to resolve. While I don’t think it’s vital to the success of the event to have decided on ALL of the topics under discussion at the event, I think it will improve the quality of nominations (if we do nominations) or attendee selections if we have SOME kind of scope of what’s going to be discussed.
Stephen Cronin 3:15 am on November 11, 2016

I was also going to ask about whether this is a Community Summit or a Contributor Summit?

The past 2 Community Summits had an application form for people who weren’t invited as contributors, but who represented other interests within the wider WordPress Community. For example, I was able to attend representing Envato, a number of hosts were able to send along representatives, people in some of the VIP agencies who weren’t active contributors attended etc).

Is that in the plan for this year? Or is this more of a Contributor Summit than a Community Summit. No problem either way – I can see how both would be valuable, but it’s probably best to clear up the scope and name it appropriately at this point. 🙂
Matt Mullenweg 4:31 pm on November 12, 2016

The great thing about a list of “challenging, controversial, or sensitive issues” is that we can see if we can resolve them before the summit, online.

We need to move faster than the cadence of the summits (or WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event./WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.) to iterate and address our biggest issues, and anything in-person will not be as inclusive as when we address these things on the P2s and in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
- Andrea Middleton 10:46 pm on December 6, 2016
  
  We need to move faster than the cadence of the summits (or WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event./WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.) to iterate and address our biggest issues, and anything in-person will not be as inclusive as when we address these things on the P2s and in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
  
  I agree wholeheartedly — lack of inclusion is my deepest concern when I think about community summits. While it’s nearly impossible to have productive discussions with 150 participants in a room (which is why we limit attendance at summits), we simply can not rely on in-person events as our primary (or even secondary) method of conflict resolution.
  
  I really worry about how invitation-only events like this reinforce a toxic “in-crowd, out-crowd” paradigm in the project, and I think we should organize them sparingly — and when we do think it’s necessary, we should work to minimize the attendance-based status/cachet as much as we can.
Kevin Cristiano 4:47 pm on December 16, 2016

I agree with the basic plan outlined by @_dorsvenabili I like the idea of the teams having an agenda, designating reps to help plan and choosing who will attend.

I am concerned about the exclusivity of the event. I get that decisions are made best with smaller groups, but as the WP project and it’s influence grows, we must also grow the number of people we have at the Community Summit. I would not want to exclude valued contributors due to a cap, nor would I want to prevent any new folks from attending. I think each team should look at it’s agenda and the agenda of the other teams (as there will be cross-pollination since we will all be together) and then set the numbers. We’d need to do this as early as possible to ensure we have space for everyone.
Cami Kaos 10:48 pm on December 16, 2016
I agree with the plan outlined but with two clarifications:
- While we do need to keep the number of attendees reasonable, it’s important to make sure we have proper representation from teams and also room for others in the project and in these discussions and work times.
- While we will have work time together this is a different kind of collaboration than a contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/..
Josepha 10:51 pm on January 10, 2017
There are a lot of really good thoughts happening in this thread. Thank you to everyone who participated. There are a few things we know that came out of this discussion:

Big Things
- Identify ahead of time the major issues that need to be discussed, not projects to build code/docs/materials for.
- Designate those who will attend as outlined above.
- Define the process for getting discussions anonymized, posted, and completed on each team’s p2 (owned by the Community Summit organizing team).
- Organizing team will have venue/logistics people (2) from WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. org team and then a person or two from each project team.
Side Notes
- Attendee limit per team is gone, but there is still limited venue space.
- Deadlines will be re-worked
- Get the organizers of the Community Summit to create a workable budget so we can figure out how to handle travel stipends if possible.
We also have a few things that needed to be hammered out:
- Travel stipends; if/how we will have and manage those.
- Time commitment required from the organizers of this event.
- How to select the primary organizer. (On this one, I would suggest selecting the primary organizer from among the group of WCEU/project team members who have agreed to volunteer their time for this event.)
I think this answers many of the questions that were preventing the good WCEU folks from getting this project moving. I’m sure there will be additional discussions, so let’s move them to https://make.wordpress.org/summit/ which is meant to be project team agnostic!

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