WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: December 2018

Hello 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. organizers!

Welcome to another meetup organizer newsletter full of news, information and inspiration for your local meetup. This will be the last newsletter for the year 2018.

Newsletter contents:

  • The Annual Meetup Survey
  • Thanks to our Global Sponsors
  • Event Format: A Meetup of 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.
  • Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops

The Annual Meetup Survey

If you have been involved with organizing meetups for a while, you will be familiar with the annual meetup surveys that we send out at the end of each year. These are surveys that we send out to all meetup organizers and members to find out how you feel the meetup program is going and provide feedback on what we can do to improve things.

This time around we’re changing the schedule slightly and will be sending those out in January 2019, so keep an eye on your inbox for those and share them with your meetup group – more responses is better for the program overall!

Thanks to our Global Sponsors

As many of you know, WordPress community programs benefit greatly from the generous financial support of a number of companies. WordPress Global Community Sponsors allow us to pay for meetup venues when necessary, help with 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) costs for WordCamps and meetups, and provide every single 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. in the world with a “nest egg” of sponsorship on the very first day of active planning.

We’d like to take a minute here to give our global sponsors a big thank you for their ongoing commitment to supporting WordPress global community programs!

Our gold sponsors for 2018 include Jetpack and WooCommerce worldwide, and Bluehost in the Americas. Silver level sponsors are GoDaddy worldwide, Bluehost in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and DreamHost in the Americas. Finally, BoldGrid was a bronze level sponsor in the Americas. Thank you to all of these companies for their dedication to global community events.

Event Format: A Meetup of Meetups

Planning for your 2019 meetup schedule and struggling to come up with ideas of find speakers? Angie Meeker might just have an idea that will help you – the Columbus tech community has quarterly “Meetup of Meetups”, where the various leaders of different meetups in get together to discuss what is upcoming at their meetups, what their needs are individually, and how they can best contribute to needs in the city. These meetups are held every quarter, with a year end ‘Meetup of Meetups” party.

This is a fantastic way to connect your local WordPress meetup group with other related communities in your area and it would be great to see a WordPress community lead the way in this sort of thing.

Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops

The meetups who have been running the diversity outreach speaker training workshop to get more women and other underrepresented groups to start speaking at their meetups and WordCamps have been having phenomenal results. Many of the WordCamps achieved 50% or more women speakers in less than a year.

Our last training of the year will be Sunday, December 16th, 2018 @ 17:00-19:00 UTC.

We will also be running trainings on the following dates:

* Thursday, January 10, 2019 @ 16:00-18:00 UTC
* January 27th, 2019 @ 17:00-19:00 UTC

Are you interested in learning more? Would you like to sign up for one of the trainings? https://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak

That’s it for now — chat to you next time!

Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community

#meetup