Feedback request for WordCamp Organizers: How do you use your WordCamp email address?

The Community Team is looking for feedback from former/current 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 about how they use their existing city@wordcamp.org email addresses. 

The Problem

WordCamp organizers are currently provided with city-based @wordcamp.org email addresses. Once the WordCamp is approved, 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. set up an email forward for the event in the format of city@wordcamp.org to the organizer’s email address (or another email address created and managed by the organizing team). The team also offers access to a webmail client if organizers wish to send mail from the city@wordcamp.org address directly. However, the webmail client is not very user-friendly and doesn’t work well when multiple people are using it.

Potential Solution and Request for Feedback

The WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org. now has a G Suite for Non-profits account. This account can be used for @wordcamp.org accounts, as well as email addresses for the Foundation itself. The Community Team is evaluating whether we can use G Suite to replace the existing cPanel-based webmail clients for both new and existing city@wordcamp.org email accounts.

Before we consider implementing G Suite for WordCamp emails, we would like to hear from WordCamp organizers about how they work with emails using the existing tools (the webmail clients and email forwarding). In short, we are trying to get more clarity on the pain-points that we are looking to solve. 

We are seeking your input to help us arrive at an informed decision on whether to switch to an email client like G Suite for processing WordCamp emails. If you are a current/former WordCamp organizer, can you answer the following questions for us?

  1. How much do you use the city@wordcamp.org email address? 
  2. What are the benefits of this provided email account over other options? 
  3. What are the current pain points of using this email account? 
  4. What other 3rd-party tools do you regularly use, and perhaps pay for, because there’s no suitable tool available from WordCamp CentralWordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each.
  5. Do you see any benefits in preserving emails from previous years in the email account?
  6. How does your organizing team handle sharing access to your WordCamp email account?

Please let us know your answers in the comments by Monday, June 8 2020. Thanks for helping us think through how we can best support our WordPress community organizers by improving our tools!