jillbinder 10:58 pm on March 25, 2020
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Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) Zoom call on March 25, 2020

Today we had a Zoom call for our meeting.

Agenda:

  1. How are you doing during the crisis?
  2. Where are you at with volunteering for the group? What do you need?
  3. Changing our project for the crisis

1. How are you doing during the crisis?

People shared the challenges that they are facing and how they are feeling.

2. Where are you at with volunteering for the group? What do you need?

I prefaced this with “Due to the crisis, I understand that how you’re feeling about it today can change tomorrow, and change each day, so this is not a commitment. This is just a check-in for today.”

Those who were able to attend today said they have the time and motivation to be volunteering for the group, but felt like it may not be the right project for the community right now. One mentioned that either our project needs to change or they will find another project to volunteer for.

3. Changing our project for the crisis

The observation I’ve made is 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. and 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. organizers are in no position to be learning a new workshop right now, nor to be thinking about diversifying their speaker lineups.

However, I believe that individual WordPress community members are looking for things to learn at home, and so they are more motivated.

These are the first ideas that Andrea and I came up with previously:

  • Individuals are craving connection, content, and personal growth. We can hold monthly workshops for individuals. There could be extra content for having stage presence online.
  • The monthly workshops could still be meetup region-specific, holding a workshop for individual 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 could hold “stage presence online”-specific workshops
  • We could offer more one-on-one speaker mentorship
  • We could hold group, open speaker mentorship sessions
  • We could offer our “Creating a welcoming and diverse space” workshop for WordPress event organizers
  • We could host open discussions about diversity issues that WordPress event organizers face

We didn’t have the time for brainstorming more ideas as we spent a lot of time on the first item of the agenda, which was the most important thing today.

I would love to hear more ideas in the comments or dm on 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/. (@jillbinder), please!

A meetup organizer said that because she’s done the workshop before and had fantastic results, she feels comfortable to do it again this year, even online.

She also mentioned that meetup organizers probably only need a couple of months of figuring things out before they are ready for learning things like this again.

#wpdiversity