Hi everyone! Sharing a recap of our conversation during the WCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. 2024 Contributor 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/. – covering the conversations we had at the Community Team tables. Many thanks to everyone who participated for your precious contributions, and to all the table leads for moderating and sparking the conversation!
Intro: We had a cross-table briefing intro from @_dorsvenabili on the new purpose of WordPress events, current challenges and state and a quick recap of the evolution of WP events. Rocío highlighted the need to ensure the growth of events/ecosystem in general – and shared cases of difficulties in diversifying our user base – both vertically (across generations) and horizontally (across professions).
Table discussions: Following the intro, participants rejoined their tables to have smaller-group conversations. Topics included:
Event Types: We discussed the various types of events we’re holding: ‘traditional’ events, which mostly meet the needs of existing community members like freelancers and makers, and more recent approaches focused on tracks (beginners, devs, etc.). While they seem to mobilize participants beyond the traditional WC audience, this is an avenue we need to explore further.
Increasing and Diversifying our User Base:
- Vertical Axis (Youth): Ensuring the longevity of our platform by engaging young people. Ideas included focusing on topics like sustainability, climate change, and mental health, and showcasing WP websites making an impact in these areas. Notably, we’re considering youth-specific events like WordPress Summer camps, 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. Youth hackathons, and meditation and mindfulness sessions that incorporate WP demonstrations.
- Horizontal Axis (Other Professionals): Widening our market share by engaging devs, agencies, and small/medium businesses. Content ideas included beginner guides to building websites, online payments, UX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it./UI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. strategies, security measures, and specific professional-focused events with deep and advanced content. We also discussed specialized events like a WP affiliates summit and B2B-focused gatherings.
Challenges:
- Giving back: Ensuring participants feel they receive value from attending.
- Community and belonging: Catering to different generations and demographics.
- Retention: Balancing the focus on new users while retaining existing ones.
- Application process: Making it more user-friendly.
- Clear agendas: Ensuring all types of events have clear objectives.
Youth Engagement:
- Making WP more relevant and accessible to youth.
- Improving communication and leveraging social media.
- Highlighting the value of Open 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. in a compelling way.
- Exploring influencer marketing and gamification.
- Rethinking product onboarding to meet the needs (and attention span) of youth.
Engaging Other Professionals:
- Highlighting the ROI of participating in WP events.
- Considering new event names and formats to appeal to a broader audience.
- Running specialized and B2B-focused events.
Future Events:
- Consider the imagery we’re using – ensure our images show diversity.
- Cater to a variety of needs – our existing user base as well as those of demographics we seek to bring in; consider running both generalist and specialized events – and highlighting / showcasing speakers from our new intended audience.
- Work with marketing in segmenting our audience and in creating adequate messaging for each segment.
- Consider a youth council to provide feedback on what would make WP more relevant/appealing to youth.
- Go back to the drawing board with both the events but also the product – if we started from scratch, what would we do differently?
- For all target groups: position WP as the catalyst for opportunity but also as an end in itself (value of open source).
- Make sure we promote the events using the social channels used by the audience we’re targeting; update our USPs (unique selling points) for the various audiences.
- Create templates to share with all organizers before the event on how to plan, promote, and conduct a WordCamp/WP Event to improve attendance (e.g. specify the topic, problems we want to solve with the event, agenda, activities planned, what to expect from the meet-up, etc.) – these can be provided in all languages and organizers only need to fill these out with event-specific information.
- Exploring the use of WP Playground as a tool for meetups 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. (Ioana writing up notes from connecting with the Playground team and drafting an outline).
Key Wins and Collaborations:
- We had several successful applications submitted during the day from Osaka, Skopje (including a WordCamp Youth hackathon), Kaunas, Lisbon, and Belgrade, with more to come, such as a WP Event for kids in the Netherlands.
- Meetup 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. organizers from various countries discussed tips and ideas to improve and reach new audiences. For example, the Leon (Spain) Meetup organizers shared their successful strategies.
- We had an interest in mentoring from Austria and the UK, with follow-ups planned.
Thanks again to everyone for their valuable contributions and participation. Let’s keep the momentum going and continue to grow and diversify our WP community!
#contributor-day, #wceu
