After the global health crisis emerged, the Community Team strongly recommended events to move online. All meetups, WordCamps and other community events were switched to an online format.
To help online event organizers, guidelines were updated in May to better facilitate the change in format and ease the work of organizers. When these guideline changes were made, the global impacts of the coronavirus and development of the situation were still unclear to some extent. The Community Team had set a deadline to Q3 2020 for reviewing the changes, with the hope to have a better understanding of the situation by then. We are now in Q3.
After some assessment, the Community Team has decided to keep updated guidelines in place and continue with online-only events until the end of the year 2020. These guidelines will be reevaluated in Q1 2021.
The team acknowledges that this is not easy for the community that has been heavily based on in-person events and encounters. Unfortunately, the global coronavirus situation does not seem to be slowing down to a level that would allow us organizing in-person events safely at this time.
Luckily, our community is rising to the challenge of adapting to new circumstances and discussion on how to create the best experience for attendees and sponsors in online events is very active. It’s heartening to see how community members create and explore new event format ideas in the midst of all this.
There’s an ongoing discussion about moving forward with online events, where changes in online 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. program and new event formats are explored. The first new event format proposal is already posted as well. These new ideas are very exciting and I suggest everyone read and comment on those posts!
I’m sure when we get to organize in-person events again, those will be very warm and emotional experiences for all. But for the time being, let’s make the most of online events to keep this awesome community going.
