Discussion: Best Practices with Community Data

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Andrea Middleton 10:33 pm on May 29, 2018

I suspect everyone’s very tired of talking about privacy and data protection. 🙁 I get it, me too.

Maybe I can kick it off: is anyone asking themselves what to do with an old list of emails collected from a local community back when a group of volunteers got enthusiastic about a well-defined content strategy bringing the community together, but then got busy and no one ever did anything with it and it’s been 13 months? Or similar? 🙂
kcristiano 11:32 am on June 7, 2018

For me the biggest challenge is that data is scattered in many places for WordCamps. Much of the data is out of our control as a Community. Google Docs is an external repository that we cannot control and we know we’ve had issues with file and folder ownership in the past. I don’t have a good solution to this problem.

I also see many camps create accounts for 3rd party services with a personal or group email account and not city@wordcamp.org. This concerns me for continuity and now for data retention policies.

I do think that we need to decide who has the role to safeguard the data and do they know where all of the data is kept? With Org teams changing every year a bit and a two year term limit on leads I do see old data being forgotten. Email lists are particularly problematic. There have been numerous times that I opted in to a 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. Subscribers list, got the Confirm from wordpress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ and then started receiving Mailchimp updates. I don’t see how we as 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. can monitor this at all. So even if a Camp is explicit about their mailing list, once the owner of that list moves on we have no way to access it.

I think we do need to establish best practices as to where data goes and how to open needed services.

We should require that if Google Docs/Drive is used it be under a shared folder that support@wordcamp.org (or another Team address) can control.

We should educate organizers on how city@wordcamp.org email works – many think that as they cannot login that they cannot get the emails. We only ask them at orientation for a forwarding address, we should explain how this works.
Francesca Marano 1:13 pm on June 8, 2018
Everything that @kcristiano said.
In addition:
- Lots of WordCamps create Google Spreadsheet where they export speakers, attendees, volunteers, sponsors for different purposes. Sometimes they are inside the Folder deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. create for them, sometimes they are outside of those, under personal accounts, so we (support@wordcamp.org) have no control over those and we don’t know who is responsible.
- Mailchimp and other services: honestly I think we should forbid organisers to use them if we can not do this through a centralised account like we do for PollDaddy.
- Past organisers that have access to previous WordCamps Google Folders. We always assume best intentions, but still, people have access to data that they no longer need
- Access to old 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. websites. Recently I sent an email to WordCamp Torino 2016 and WordCamp Torino 2017 attendees to tell them about WordCamp Torino 2018. I don’t think this is possible, we had a chat with @chanthaboune about it in the Community-Team channel and for this matter as well there are different rules in different countries, but I would assume since no one give explicit consent to be contacted about future WordCamps this is not OK and people need to know this.
OT but related to informing WordCamp organisers about these rules and best practices.
I appreciate that we know have pages about it in the handbook, but after mentoring more than 10 WordCamps in the past two years, I think most organisers don’t realise when there are additions to it because they don’t all follow this blog. Would it be possible to send this kind of info to all WordCamps at once?
Hristo Pandjarov 10:21 am on June 20, 2018
All of the above plus:
- I think special attention should be paid to CampTix because they gather all the visitors information plus a payment method.
- Consider all the printing stuidos that have received order for badges – all of them have personal infomation
- Super special attention to kids workshops and similar, I personally have sheets with information about children and their parents and I am not sure what to do with it. All on Google sheets of course.

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