Meetup Organizer Newsletter: June 2020

Hello friends,

We are happy to share with you another edition of our 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. organizer newsletter, packed full of updates from past and upcoming WordPress events, as well as news, information, and inspiration for your local meetup.

Newsletter contents:

  • Online Event Updates
  • Upcoming Online Events
  • An opportunity to highlight your Meetup Group
  • Tuesday Trainings

Online Event Updates

WordCamp Europe Online 2020 
Following the success of 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. Spain online, WordCamp Europe was held fully online from June 4 to 6. The event had a record 8,600 sign-ups from people belonging to 138 countries, along with 2,500 sign-ups for the contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.. WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. Online also had 33 sponsors and 40 sponsors, along with a Q&A with Matt Mullenweg. You can find the videos of the event in WordPress.tv by following the link, or you can catch the live stream recording of the entire event from the WP Europe YouTube Channel.

do_action Japan
The first online do_actiondo_action do_action hackathons are community-organised events that are focussed on using WordPress to give deserving charitable organisations their own online presence. Learn more on doaction.org. event – do_action Japan was held from May 16 – 17. About 70 Japanese WordPress community members and 9 non-profit organizations came together to do the event, which was also the first do_action event in Japan. The team made use of free tools such as 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/., Gmail, Google Forms/Sheets/Docs/Slides, as well as Figma for design, and Zoom for calls to plan the event. You can read more about the event in its recap in the Make/Community blog

WordCamp Kent online
On May 30-31, 2020, the Northeast Ohio WordPress community came together online for the first online edition of WordCamp Kent. The event had over 1400 attendees from all across the world, along with 21 speakers and 10 sponsors! For those who missed the event, videos of the event will soon be available on WordPress.tv! 

Featured Online Meetup: 
The WordPress Pune meetup (Pune, Maharashtra, India) is planning a weekly online meetup series called the: “WordPress Community Check-in Meetup”. The event is planned as a casual check-in for all attendees, and the idea is to mitigate the struggles faced by community members due to the lack of social interaction due to COVID-19. The first edition of the event – is scheduled for Friday, June 12th at 5:00 PM IST, and will subsequently be held every Friday.

Upcoming Online Events

While many people in the community miss the camaraderie of in-person events — that are currently on a pause due to COVID-19 — online events enable people to attend 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. and WordCamps all across the world. In fact, we encourage you to attend online meetups and WordCamps, as it offers an unmatched learning experience! You can find out about all upcoming events here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/events/online/

If your local community is interested in learning about a certain topic, and if you are unable to find local speakers, feel free to reach out to external speakers. Other organizers have been able to  successfully recruit a speaker they found on a WordCamp speaker list, for their online meetup.

If you are holding a meetup online, please use the tag #OnlineWPMeetup so that the WordPress Marketing team can find you and bring you some communications and marketing support.

Here are some highlighted WordPress events and workshops coming soon:

  • WordCamp Denver 2020
    The WordPress Community of Denver, CO is coming up with the first edition of their Online WordCamp on June 26-27. The organizers promise a fun, informative, stress-free virtual conference for beginners, developers, and everyone in-between. The event will have 30-40 minute talks, fun activities, workshop-style sessions, Q&A panels, and more on a variety of WordPress topics, among others. Tickets for WordCamp Denver are free. Get yours now!
  • Diversity Speaker Training
    The Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) has two kinds of workshops to highlight. As many tech events are moving to an online model, the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) would like to help your community members from marginalized and underrepresented groups share their knowledge at your virtual meetups and WordCamps. Even if you are not holding your events online yourself at this time, your members could be speaking at virtual events in other communities, and be excited to speak at yours once your events are on again.
    1. We are holding workshops for the members of your community from marginalized and underrepresented groups: 
      https://make.wordpress.org/community/tag/WPDiversityWorkshops
      Next series: Late July (dates TBD). It will be announced at the link.
    2. We are holding facilitator trainings so you can learn how to run the workshop for your community: https://tiny.cc/wpdiversity
      Next training: July 18 at 5-7pm UTC. For this one and other dates, please fill out this form.

Opportunities to highlight your Meetup Group

We have two opportunities for you to highlight your local meetup group, as well as your events!

  1. Showcase your Meetup group in the Meetup.com blog
    Meetup.com would like to highlight one of our groups, to inspire other community organizers, and also to recognize the work that WordPress volunteers do. Would you like to have your local Meetup group featured in the Meetup.com blog? Did your group host a unique event that you’d like to share to inspire other community organizers? Send us an email to support@wordcamp.org with a brief description of your Meetup group, as well as any pictures of your meetups. We will review your suggestions and select some to  pass them along to Meetup.com. You have until June 30th, 2020, 23:59 UTC to send us your suggestions! 
  2. Feature your Online Meetups in our newsletter
    In an effort to highlight the hard work done by meetup organizers across the world, we will be sharing stories about online events from local meetup groups. Would you like to highlight recent online events from your local meetup group in our monthly newsletter? We will publish a call for content post for the next edition of the newsletter in the first week of July. Please comment on the post when it is up, or just send us an email to support@wordcamp.org to share about events in your local meetup group.

Tuesday Trainings

We started Tuesday Trainings (#tuesdaytrainings) last month as a way to share knowledge and help to train organizers and interested community members in a variety of skills, while also adding additional training documentation to our handbooks. Each week on Tuesday a different topic will be highlighted on the WordPress Community Blog. The content will come in a variety of formats including blog posts, recorded presentations, discussions, and workshops. You can find links to the latest Tuesday training posts below: 

Upcoming Tuesday Training Alert

On Tuesday, the 16th of June, the Community Team is planning a live 1 hour workshop on conflict de-escalation, by one of our long-time Community 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., Andrea Middleton. The session will offer a better understanding of conflict and how it intensifies, plus a step-by-step guide for responding strategically to de-escalate conflict in text communication. The workshop will happen over video chat at 9am PST (4pm UTC). If you’d like to be a part of the online event please respond in comments of this post. You can expect a calendar invite and an email reminder on Monday with more information on joining the call.

If you’d like to contribute your knowledge for a Tuesday Training, please email us at support@wordcamp.org 

If you have any questions, Community Team 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. are available to help. Please send an email to support@wordcamp.org or join the #community-events Slack channel. Thanks for everything you do to grow the WordPress community, let’s keep sharing knowledge and inspiring our Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. Community! 

We’ll see you online soon!
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