Sjoerd Blom 7:53 pm on October 6, 2022
Tags: WordCamps ( 241 )

Idea: Freescout for WordCamp organising teams

When organising a 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., the organisers have to handle a large number of emails. Large is actually an understatement. For the past years, WordCamp Europe has been using email addresses in the domain wp-europe.org, every team had their own mailbox: sponsors@wp-europe.org, content@wp-europe.org, and so on. Somehow this is ideal, as it allows to structure mailboxes across the teams, but it does not allow teams to see each other’s emails, nor an easy email handover from one team to another.

WordCamps have its own email address in the wordcamp.org domain by default: berlin@wordcamp.org, madrid@wordcamp.org, europe@wordcamp.org, and so on. And since October 2020 WordCamps are given Google Workspace because of the non-profit status of the Foundation (https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/wordcamp-organizer/first-steps/web-presence/g-suite-for-wordcamps/).

For the past editions, the WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. organisers have been pleased with Freescout as it is right now: it’s mature, it’s stable and allowed us to handle large numbers of emails. Freescout started as an 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. clone of Helpscout. We discovered that it has a very powerful search engine for emails.

Advantages of Freescout over Google Mail

no need to share the credentials of Google Mail with 40+ organisers
Google Mail credentials are only known to Freescout, not to the users of Freescout
grant individual access in Freescout to the general inbox
keep track of which user did what in Freescout (replied to customers, moved/deleted emails)
assigning emails to users (handlers)
adding internal notes to emails
smart tagging and structuring of incoming emails
quickly handing over emails from one team to another
notify 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/. about new emails
keeping track of previous conversations for a particular email address
email is still received in the Google Mail
email is still sent out via Google Mail

The only disadvantage of Freescout is that it needs a web server to offer its service. Since WCEU 2021 we’re using a small Digital Ocean VPS to host our Freescout instance.
I’ve had a couple of talks with the organisers of WordCamp Asia and WordCamp US, they both have a similar setup. We have come to the conclusion that we’re reinventing the wheel here and that it would make sense if Freescout would be part of the default stack for WordCamp organising teams. Especially the larger WordCamps would benefit from Freescout, as they have to handle very large quantities of correspondence with sponsors, speakers, volunteers and other external parties (WCEU 2022 had over 3,000 emails to process!)

Let me know what you think.

#wordcamps

David 9:26 pm on October 6, 2022

As long as we supply a getting started with document I think it’s a great idea. The hand off of materials year to year for a 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. is always a little bit of a drag.
- Sjoerd Blom 7:02 am on October 7, 2022
  
  Especially handing over the credentials of Google Workspace with 2FA enabled… Asking all the previous organisers the same question: “Does your phone number end with xyz??”
Maestro Stevens 11:31 pm on October 6, 2022

I’m not too familiar with Freescout, but I do use something similar called Fluent Support and Fluent CRM.

I believe Freescout is like a combo of both of them in ways. So that’s where I was looking to get an understanding of what Freescout could do or be used for.

I think this would be a good idea. It would take some adaptations or adaptability, but it seems the transition of benefits outweighs the cons.

I plan on co-organizing a 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. for Northeast Ohio in 2023, so this would be interesting if we were testers of this trial period.
Timi Wahalahti 8:25 am on October 7, 2022

Freescout, or any other email ticketking system, would be excellent addition to tools 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. provides to organising teams! Experience with WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. using Freescout is inspiring. As a WCEU mentorEvent Supporter Event Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues. I did see so many advantages and how email ticketing really helped the team.

One consideration thought is our available resources, mainly developer time, as hosting Freescout requires some work. That’s why I wonder if we could get HelpScout, tool we already use, to discount us and if that would be a viable option?
- David E. Smith 2:38 am on October 8, 2022
  
  Truthfully it’s not that much work to set up (source: I did it for WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.), and I’m sure that with more people working on it, selecting and configuring its components should be straightforward.
  
  I have no idea what HelpScout licensing costs, but if this is something to be rolled out for every camp it would require several hundred seats. Not saying it’s impossible, but it probably isn’t trivial.
  
  Unrelated: it’s Yet Another Credential. Might be worthwhile to investigate authentication hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same., see if FreeScout could be connected to .org or similar. It’s possible in the abstract, there’s an LDAP add-on available, but obviously this would be a new integration. (I’m not a developer, so I’m not volunteering. And it would be workable without this, but it would be a nice bonus.)
  - Kathy Drewien 6:04 pm on October 9, 2022
    
    We’ve used FreeScout for email communications during WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. since 2019 and will continue to do so in 2023 (and most likely in future years) for all the benefits over GMail, as listed above. Our setup is that wordcampusa@gmail.com forwards to us@wordcamp.org. The admin management is straightforward and team transition year after year is simple. My impression is that HelpScout will require additional layers of login administration.
  - Ian Dunn 6:16 pm on October 10, 2022
    
    Truthfully it’s not that much work to set up (source: I did it for WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.)
    
    I agree that this is a problem, and Freescout seems like a good project.
    
    If our Systems team agreed to do it, though, they’d probably spend a lot more time on setup and ongoing maintenance, since they have enterprise-level standards for security, uptime, backups, etc. That’d be on top of everything else they’re maintaining, so it’s not really as simple as just setting up a VPS and running an install script.
    
    There could also be complexities and limitations around the interaction between FreeScout, HelpScout, and GSuite, etc, as well as the added support burden when something inevitably breaks.
    
    We could ask though, especially if using HelpScout doesn’t turn out to be a reasonable cost.
    
    cc @dd32 since he knows more than me 🙂
    - Dion Hulse 12:56 am on October 11, 2022
      
      I’ve used Freescout before for 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. organising, and while it has some limitations, it’s miles better than a shared Google inbox.
      
      The install and configuration of Freescout is very minimal, I would for-see very little technical limitations there (aside from wanting to isolate it to it’s own VM).. However, It would require having it interact with many gmail inboxes which could make the cron task it runs rather slow – although I don’t think that’s going to be a shot-stopper.
      
      The major difference between the two that I can think of:
      
      Freescout is open-source, extendable (plugins can do anything), can be integrated with our Authentication, and uses IMAP to interact with a Gmail inbox.
      
      Helpscout is closed-source, limited extendability through sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. widgets only, need to use their users management (OR SAML/Google SSO), and requires email forwards to be setup for each camp for receiving emails.
      
      HelpScout Costing…
      
      Based on the costs of using HelpScout for WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, I don’t believe it would be a viable option here.
      
      Based on the costs of using HelpScout for non-profits at their public 10% discounted rates, I don’t believe it would be a viable option here.
      
      Based on the costs of using HelpScout for 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., through that legacy plan, it would be a viable alternative.
      
      HelpScout could be a viable alternative, depending on if WordCamps fit within one of the For Good Discounted plans. Given the Foundation is already on a discounted legacy plan, it might fit.
      
      And the major disadvantage of FreeScout is that we/systems would have another application to manage the maintenance of, upgrades, any security issues, etc. Most of us who have used FreeScout have not had to concern ourselves with that, as it’s not been on dotorg, and probably just on a VM that we’ve been willing to destroy and start again..
      - Angela Jin 3:19 pm on October 26, 2022
        
        Thank you for all this information, @dd32!
- Ian Dunn 6:14 pm on October 10, 2022
  
  IIRC @hlashbrooke and Andrea looked into a discount a few years ago, but there were some IRS complexities and we wouldn’t be able to use the Foundation, so it’d have to go through WPCS (PBC rather than 501c3). That might still be good enough for HelpScout, though.
  
  Do we have a sense of how much this would help the majority of camps, since they’re much smaller than the regional ones?
  
  If it’d only be a “nice to have” for them, then adding only the large camps to our current HelpScout account could be worth considering. It might not cost that much, especially if we delete the majority of users after the camp is over.
  
  That could be the simplest way forward, if it’d be good enough.
  - Timi Wahalahti 6:33 pm on October 10, 2022
    
    Do we have a sense of how much this would help the majority of camps, since they’re much smaller than the regional ones?
    
    From my perspective, running a smaller event can be done with a traditional email account – especially now as we have G Suite. It can be a bit messy but doable.
    
    Actually, one thing we could do to help smaller WordCamps is create multiple G Suite accounts for them or use aliases which automatically categorise emails to pre-defined folders; narnia@, narnia.speakers@, narnia.sponsors@ etc.
    
    If it’d only be a “nice to have” for them, then adding only the large camps to our current HelpScout account could be worth considering. It might not cost that much, especially if we delete the majority of users after the camp is over.
    
    Flagship 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. can easily have 20+ users for 10 months, which quickly costs plenty, depending on our HS plan.
  - Dion Hulse 1:00 am on October 11, 2022
    Do we have a sense of how much this would help the majority of camps, since they’re much smaller than the regional ones?
    
    I actually think it would be better than a gmail inbox for the majority of camps, especially any camp that has more than 5 organisers.
    
    The major problem I’ve seen run into in the past with Shared inboxes is the lack of accountability.
    
    No idea who marked something as read (Even if it needed a reply ASAP and they didn’t understand that)
    
    No idea who replied to something
    
    No idea who sent that email
    
    etc..
    
    edit: I realise this is mostly a human trust problem. I don’t normally believe in using technical solutions for that.. but 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. organisers while trusted people are also community volunteers, sometimes just knowing who did something provides enough context for others to trust the email is properly being dealt with.
    - David E. Smith 1:53 am on October 11, 2022
      
      Shared mailboxes absolutely come with technical problems too. WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. used to use a single Gmail account. We all got locked out pretty regularly because “this mailbox is being accessed by dozens of unique IPs thousands of miles apart” certainly looks like a compromised account. The fact that Freescout and similar tools provide a single interface to the underlying mailbox, conveniently resolves both technical and people issues.
  - Angela Jin 3:21 pm on October 26, 2022
    
    I did recently chat with HelpScout around their pricing structure. They do have a discount for non-profit accounts, but it was still quite expensive, imo, and still based on number of users.
Naoko Takano 2:58 am on October 13, 2022

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. Asia is using FreeScout (thanks to @samsuresh for configuring it) and it’s been great. We got some modules enabled and they help us save time and avoid mistakes.

I can see any size of organizing team can benefit from it, as FreeScout makes it easier to collaborate. We always encourage lead organizers to delegate tasks, and having a tool like this helps to empower team members.

Volunteer time is valuable – if WordCamps can share good practices and automation through using tools to free up their hands from doing tedious tasks, that’s great.
Angela Jin 3:43 pm on October 26, 2022
Thanks for bringing this up, @vertizio! In my experience, FreeScout has been a great option for the flagship events, and I’m glad that WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event., WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event., and WC Asia are already set up 🎉

Based on the feedback I’m seeing here, it sounds like we want to explore this as an option, especially for large organizing teams. Keep in mind that Flagships are the outlier, the organizing team size (and number of organizers who actually work with emails) is much larger than other WordCamps. Given @iandunn and @dd32‘s comments, we also need to better understand the ask of systems.

With all that in mind, perhaps the community team could explore the following?
- At what size organizing team would FreeScout address the problems posed by G Suite, and how many WC organizing teams are that large?
- Could @sippis‘s suggestion of G Suite accounts or aliases help smaller organizing teams?
- What documentation might we need to help teams get set up with FreeScout, and what else would they need to do or have to make it work?
With that info, I think we’d be able to better understand what we are asking of both systems and organizers and make some good decisions!
dabrattoli 4:26 pm on November 3, 2022

As someone who has been organizing 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 has been an organizer on multiple WordCamps I like the fact you can:

No need to share the credentials of Google Mail with 40+ organizers

Google Mail credentials are only known to Freescout, not to the users of Freescout

The ability to grant individual access in Freescout to the general inbox

The ability to keep track of which user did what in Freescout (replied to customers, moved/deleted emails)

The ability assigning emails to users (handlers)
notify 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/. about new emails

I think it would be a better way to handle emails when organizing WordCamps instead of the current Google suite option we used over the past couple of camps. The self-hosting of the Freescout sounds it will come with some growing pains and will need some support when a new team takes over. I definitely think it is something that should be looked into being a standard 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. organizing toolset.
Timi Wahalahti 1:08 pm on November 21, 2022

For flagship events, using normal email accounts is not a viable option. There are just way too many emails and people.

I’d be interested to hear systems’ opinion on hosting Freescout. Maybe even looking at the larger picture of hosting it also in our current HelpScout usage in mind – the transition would be somewhat painful with all the history, workflows etc but in the end could reduce costs (as I understood, we already pay a significant amount to HelpScout on dotorg level).

Another option to consider is to allow flagship events to use dotorg HelpScout, but they’d have to budget for that. The main obstacle with this might be that someone always needs to create and configure those accounts, as well as do all the access changes… and that’s also labour-intensive for the current metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team.
Sam Suresh 10:00 am on November 23, 2022
Flagship events not just using FreeScout. They also use many other custom tools. I wrote how to setup FreeScout for WordCamps last year:

https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/wordcamp-organizer/first-steps/web-presence/using-freescout-for-email-collaboration/

We have few options to weigh:
1. Provide a hosting space to Flagship events aside from official website. This will allow them to install FS or any other tools. For example WC Asia also have another https://wpasia.org/visa-letter/ which totally on someone else’s server. When a tool is hosted on a server, technically someone has to pay for it. And when that someone stop paying, it goes away. So IMO, the best solution is central provide a hosting space for flagships will solve this issue. The hosting space can be managed by the website team of the respective flagship events.
2. Central provide FS – As we read this proposal on providing FreeScout for WordCamps, I think this is a huge burden for #metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.-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.. FS is not very stable when it pushes updates. I will not recommend a centralised FS.
Google Workspace that we provide to WordCamps already has many of these features. Only flagship events require tools like FS and custom tools for 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/., Visa tool and a other custom scripts for check-in, QR etc.

I think option no 1 open up a lot of possibilities for Flagship events to host and manage various tools and Central still can keep everything once event over since its hosted in one of our servers.
- Sam Suresh 5:44 am on November 24, 2022
  
  Also handbook page on setting up Freescout for camps:
  https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/wordcamp-organizer/first-steps/web-presence/using-freescout-for-email-collaboration/
Marco Almeida | Webdados 9:53 am on January 18, 2023

I’m lead organizing 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. Lisboa 2023 and we did set up a Freescout account. Best thing ever. I do understand that, although it might look easy to setup, what we did for a single WordCamp is not exactly what needs to be done to provide a standardized tool for all WordCamps. Maybe this can be rolled out in betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. testing in some volunteer WordCamps and then go from there.
Pascal Casier 6:42 am on June 11, 2023

@samsuresh @angelasjin @dd32
Has there been any progress, discussions, follow up after these very valuable comments? We have just finished a great WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event., so as we are preparing for the next one, this would be a great moment to switch. I can help in performing the installations and maintaining. Thanks a lot for any help.
- Dion Hulse 1:24 am on June 12, 2023
  
  No progress has been made that I’m aware of; Feedback has been requested from the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ systems team, but no response has been received yet.
David E. Smith 2:04 pm on June 21, 2023

Do we have a proper way to pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” them? That request is a few months old at this point, it may have been inadvertently overlooked, forgotten about, et cetera.

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Idea: Freescout for WordCamp organising teams

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