In the words of the author Junot Diaz, “We all have a blind spot around our privileges shaped exactly like us.”
For members of the WordPress community, it can be difficult to know where to start to make our events more accessible and inclusive to a wider variety of people. In the spirit of openness, creating events that are inclusive, welcoming, and encourage a wide variety of attendees to join are some of our community’s biggest priorities. However, even with the best intentions, inclusion only truly thrives when we collaborate with others who have different experiences and backgrounds from ourselves.
That’s where you come in.
What is the Global Diversity Team?
The Global Diversity Team is a diverse collection of WordPress community members, organizers, and participants who are interested in providing educational resources and guidelines to the community to actively promote diversity and inclusion.
Our goal is to create safe, inclusive, and welcoming events, for all participants. We believe that change starts within our communities, whether that’s at a meetup 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. or one of the larger WordCamps. Our hope is to conduct this work in conjunction with the many other diversity and inclusion projects ongoing within the WordCamp 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. community, such as the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training and the Code of Conduct Team.
What’s next?
We’ve been meeting bi-weekly for the past two months to develop our goals and vision for this project. In order to make our vision as inclusive as possible, we need more people to help us.
The team is still in its beginning stages. We’re looking for volunteers who are interested in developing project ideas, guidelines, and curricula for event organizers to make their events more accessible. We especially welcome participants from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, experience levels, interests, and marginalized groups.
If you’re interested in joining, please talk to us in Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. and we’ll add you to the group (names are below the post). We’re looking forward to making WordPress even more diverse and accessible with you!
The current Team is also willing to answer all the questions you have here in the comments or if you want to chat in private with us you can do that in Slack.
Laura Herzog (@lauraquellmalz)
Erica Varlese (@evarlese)
Birgit Olzem (@coachbirgit)
Bas Brader (@basbrader)
Carole Olinger (@caroleo)