Recap of the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training meeting on January 10th, 2018

Start time stamp in Community-Team 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/.
https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1515603635000034

Attending:
@jillbinder @newyorkerlaura @miriamgoldman @andreamiddleton @dianewallace 

Today’s Agenda

  • Promotion Plan goal
  • Status on the convo about where our coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. message will live
  • Our core message
  • Promotion Plan
  • Taking on first steps!

Promotion Plan goal

The overarching Promotion Plan goal:

Make people in WP community aware of diversity speaker training workshop

Status on the convo about where our core message will live

In order to do this, we will be directing 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. organizers to visit an article online that contains our message and asks them to sign up for a form. There they will let us know if they wish to run it and if they would like our help.

@andreamiddleton will be discussing with the community team in their next meeting where that message will live online, how we’ll do up the form, and where the answers will be sent. There are many considerations in the bigger picture so she needs to discuss it with them. In the end we’ll need something where our team can easily access the answers, see what we’ve written to respondents so that none of us are repeating what someone else has said, etc.

We may be needing to keep a spreadsheet of the statuses of the workshop at the 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. manually because of some of these considerations.

That’s handy though as then we can also include in another tab of the spreadsheet our own promotion efforts.

Our Core Message

Have you ever had trouble getting women (or: people who identify as women) to speak at your meetups and WordCamps?

Check out the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training workshop! https://make.wordpress.org/training/speaker-training

This workshop and variations of it have been run in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Montréal, New York City, Toronto, and Brighton, and all had a significant increase in the number of 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. speakers who identify as women. Vancouver and Montreal for example have had at least 50% for 3 years in a row, and this year Seattle has had the highest ratio so far, with 60% women speakers.

The global community teamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps. has a working group available to train people to run the workshop and provide the materials, and we want to hear from you! To let us know if you’re interested in conducting this workshop in your community, please fill in this form.

The form will have boxes for running the workshop without us, wanting our help, and thinking about doing it later.

@jillbinder Wondered aloud if it should be changed to “people who identify as women” and will check with @andreamiddleton about how that will play out elsewhere since this will go out globally.

@newyorkerlaura, @andreamiddleton, and @jillbinder discussed if the wording should be “Would you like help in achieving 50% of your speaker applicants to be those that identify as women?” @andreamiddleton pointed out that it is not our purpose to set priorities for organizers, but to give them the tools to reach a goal.

 

Promotion Plan

The first things we’re going to focus on in promotion are:

  • Tweets
  • Emailing the meetup organizers
  • Add an “event type” of this workshop to the meetup organizers’ handbook

First Focuses

Tweets

We are going to send a link to this on the Twitter accounts: WordPress, WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event., and we’ll see if we can get permission for WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event.:

“Want to recruit more women (or: people who identify as women) speakers in your local WordPress community?” with a link to our post and form.

(maybe again change wording to “people who identify as women” – tbd)

@newyorklaura offered to come up with sample tweets and a hashtag for us. [While posting these notes, Jill remembers that we came up with a hashtag in the last meeting. She will show it to Laura who can use or change it.)]

Emailing the meetup organizers

For the emailing, Andrea’s team will be sending the post out to all the meetup organizers — possibly as early as end of January. So our goal is to have the details sorted and ready for her team for January 19th.

The only thing I believe we have left is finding out where it will live and how we will set up the form. And then actually doing these, of course.

@jillbinder may reach out for help in doing these

Event Type in the Meetup Organizers’ Handbook

@andreamiddleton added: “oh, another action soon: add the information on the diversity speaker training workshop “event type” to the meetup organizers’ handbook”

The Rest of the Promotion Plan

For the rest of promotion, we have a list of things we can do. Starting now, at each meeting the meeting lead should ask who would like to do something from this list or another idea that they have:

  • Writing articles (we can coordinate with marketing for their help
  • Speaking about it in the Slack groups of countries
  • Speaking about it in Facebook groups
  • Speaking to people about it at WordCamps
  • People who are already doing Diversity work, ask for a mention in their talks or a tweet out to their followers
  • Leveraging the monthly or quarterly email newsletters to chapter meetup organizers that may be starting
  • Asking former workshop attendees to write articles about how attending the workshop affected them
  • tv which posts to YouTube. Creating a YouTube playlist.

@miriamgoldman offered to spread/speak about it over Slack/FB groups, as well as any WordCamps she may attend this year, starting with:

  • Slack for Canada
  • FB communities: sub-communities on FB, like Ottawa/Montreal/Toronto (and Rochester, honourary Canadians..)
  • WordCamp Miami in March when she is speaking there

She will do these a week after the article and form go out online, date to be confirmed with Jill.

@jillbinder offered to post it to FB Vancouver and the Vancouver internal organizing team on Slack. She will include a request for posting it to places in Canada that Miriam and she have not already covered.

@newyorkerlaura will reach out to some of the Diveristy folks she knows to tweet it out. She can also write an article about it once she gets from our team how the focus should go.

@jillbinder will create and write all of these items down in our promotion spreadsheet, so we’ll all be able to see who is doing what and by when, and so we can spread out the efforts.

@jillbinder reminded everyone that as mentioned in a prev meeting, it would be great if once it’s out on the WordPress twitters, folks in our team retweet that.

Anyone who is reading this later, whether you’re on the team or not, feel free to reach out to @jillbinder about anything you’d like to do.

Other

We had the first train the trainer session in December and we’re having a wrap-up training in a week on Tuesday, January 16th @ 5pm-5:30pm UTC (9am-9:30am PST, 12pm-12:30pm EST).

End meeting time stamp

https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1515605557000490

 

#wpwomenspeak