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This analysis examines global trends in WordPress MeetupMeetupMeetup 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. events from January 2023 to June 2024, focusing on both in-person and online events with at least 50 RSVPs, while excluding canceled events. The goal is to understand WordPress Meetup trends globally and identify commonalities with other tech groups active on Meetup.com.
Note: I focused on events with more than 50 RSVPs to identify the types that generate the highest interest among our worldwide meetup members, but this does not mean that I consider events with fewer than 50 RSVPs unsuccessful. Our 750+ groups range from fewer than 20 to over 5000 members.
TL;DR:
The Learn WordPress Online Workshops, led by full-time sponsored contributors, emerged as a significant trend, with sessions on modern web layouts and JavaScriptJavaScriptJavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. being particularly popular. In-person events saw the highest engagement in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, India, while online events drew attention to SEO, accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), and AI topics. The WordPress Accessibility Meetup, an online-only volunteer-run group which cover accessible navigation and writing, also received substantial interest.
Regionally, Asia, especially India, showed strong engagement in in-person events. This could be tied to a higher population rate compared to other regions. Online learning events attracted more interest than their in-person counterparts, and accessibility remained a high-interest topic across the board.
General Meetup trends for other Tech groups indicate seasonal declines in attendance and a post-COVID shift towards virtual events. Popular topics for online events included AI and APIAPIAn API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. design, while in-person events focused more on gaming, security, and AI development.
Next steps: Looking ahead, I’d love to develop further regional analysis to understand the types of events that are most successful in each area. Community feedback and participation in this endeavor are encouraged. Please leave a comment or reach out to me on SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. (@ peiraisotta) if you want to join me.
For those who enjoy delving into the numbers, please read the extended analysis below.
2023: We had 3890 total events (2223 in-person and 1667 online). Of those, 110 in-person and 189 online events had 50+ RSVPs.
2024 (as of June 26): 1207 in-person and 659 online events, with 52 in-person and 72 online events having over 50 RSVPs.
Average Attendance:
In-person events: 17 RSVPs
Online events: 24.5 RSVPs
Premise: The Location Challenge for Online-Only Meetup Groups
Meetup.com requires you to pick a location before creating a group, even for our online-only groups. The widgetWidgetA WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. in the WordPress dashboards shows upcoming events based on the selected location. This means that online-only events are not automatically visible to everyone. The WordPress Accessibility Meetup group and other theme-based, online-only meetupsMeetupMeetup 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. would benefit from appearing in everyone’s WP events dashboard widget, not just the arbitrarily designated city. For instance, the WordPress Accessibility Meetup group and the Learn WordPress Online Workshops are registered in San Francisco, US, and the Quedadas Online en Español (WordPress Gatherings in Spanish, with organizers and members both in Europe and LatAm) are registered in Madrid, Spain.
Top Trends
Learn WordPress Online Workshops:
Hosted 374 events with an average of 47.5 RSVPs per event.
Top events included developer-focused sessions like “Building modern web layouts with WordPress blocks” and “JavaScript for modern WordPress development.”
Top Trends Excluding Learn WordPress Online Workshops:
In-person events: 3430 events with an average of 17 RSVPs.
Online events: 1952 events with an average of 20 RSVPs.
Top in-person events: Mostly in Asia, particularly India.
Top online events: Focused on accessibility and AI.
Regional Trends
Excluding the Learn WordPress Online Workshops group, which is registered in the US/Pacific time zone, but including the WordPress Accessibility Meetup group, also registered in the US/Pacific time zone, the following is the regional activity of WordPress Meetup events, both in-person and online, from January 1, 2023, to June 26, 2024.
Region
Total Groups
Total Events
Total RSVPs
Africa
47
256
2954
Asia
138
1030
26060
Australia/Pacific
10
106
1597
Europe/Canary
199
1770
31291
LatAm
44
221
4302
US/Canada
134
1999
31553
Number of Events per Group
Below is the average number of events each group organized between January 1, 2023, and June 26, 2024.
US/Canada: 14.9
Australia/Pacific: 10.6
Europe/Canary: 8.9
Asia: 7.5
Africa: 5.4
LatAm: 5.0
Note: Among our groups, some meet consistently one or more times per month, while nearly half haven’t had any events in the past three months. These disparities impact the averages.
Want to help reactivate the inactive WordPress Meetup groups in your region? Join the Reactivation initiative!
General Meetup Trends
I asked our point of contact at Meetup.com Customer Success about worldwide trends for Meetup events within the ‘Tech’categoryCategoryThe 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. to make the analysis as relevant as possible.
It is important to note that Meetup.com’s popularity as an event and community platform varies by country, and the following feedback refers only to Meetup.com trends. Therefore, it might not represent global trends within tech communities that do not use Meetup.com.
Below is the feedback and information received. In general, Meetup.com observes:
Seasonal decreases in activity due to summer vacations and winter holidays.
General decline in attendance at in-person tech events post-COVID-19.
Shift to virtual events: 40% of RSVPs for tech events are online. For non-tech events, the percentage of online events VS in-person events is 17%, showing a stronger preference to online events for tech events compared to event types.
Below are some potential reasons identified that explain the shift to virtual events:
Remote work culture has changed professional dynamics and networking habits. (People seem less likely to go to the city for an event if they’ve been working from home all day, some have moved away from city centers, others got more used to online networking, etc.)
Content accessibility: Event recordings and online resources reduce the need for real-time attendance.
Changed priorities: Increased focus on personal time and family, which results in decreased meetup attendance and engagement.
Popular General Meetup Topics:
Online: AI, API, Design.
In-person: Gaming, Security, AI, Development.
Key Insights
In-person WP events: engagement appears to be stronger in Asia, especially in India, compared to other regions. It could be useful to understand whether this is primarily related to the high population rate or if there are specific organizational characteristics that other communities could learn from.
Online learning events seem to attract more interest than in-person learning events.
In-person social events seem to be more popular than in-person learning events.
Accessibility seems to be a high interest topic among community members.
Observations
There is a noticeable disparity in activity levels among WordPress Meetup groups, with some groups being very active, while many others organize less than two events per year. This highlights the importance of initiatives like the current Meetup Reactivation effort, which aims to invigorate inactive groups. Such initiatives are crucial for fostering an active and engaged community, ensuring that more groups can benefit from regular events and increased participation. By reactivating these groups, the WordPress community can enhance collaboration, knowledge sharing, and overall engagement across different regions. If you want to get involved, please reach out to @devinmaeztri or @courtneypk, or drop a message in the #community-team channel on Slack.
The above analysis focuses on WordPress Meetup trends worldwide, comparing countries of different sizes, population rates, WordPress Groups, and members. To gain a real understanding of regional trends, it would be interesting and useful to analyze the activity of each region and each country separately.
Feedback and additional insights from the community are welcome to enhance this analysis.
Call for interest
I intend to analyze the regional activity of our Meetup groups to determine which events are most successful in each region, providing organizers with valuable insights into the types of events that attract the most interest in their area. If anyone is interested in joining me, please leave a comment under this post or reach out to me via Slack (@ peiraisotta) before Friday, July 26, 2024.
In the past months, we’ve asked to the Program Supporters and Managers of the Global Community TeamGlobal Community TeamA group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps. how they feel about their contribution to the team. By raising awareness among the team about the challenges that we are currently facing, we hoped to identify possible solutions to increase satisfaction, engagement and contribution.
Goal of the Analysis
Identify recurrent challenges that prevent Program Supporters and Managers from proactively performing team’s tasks to empower contributors and improve team members’ experience.
The Process
The survey was directed only to the Program Supporters and Managers
The questions focused on the most recurrent tasks performed by the Community Team: HelpScout triage, event application vetting, and event orientation
To analyze the open-ended questions, I experimented using Chat GPT first to find most recurrent trends, and then double checking myself
The findings
Time availability is the biggest challenge
A poor onboarding experience translates into lack of confidence and challenges to proactive contribution
Most of the team would benefit from working in smaller task-oriented groups
Many team members want to improve their leadership and project management skills
Possible Solutions
→ Define a more structured and complete onboarding process
→ Create working groups/task-oriented teams with veteran and new supporters
→ Implement a clear task assignment & tracking system
→ Increase the number of internal trainings & create new learning opportunities
Next Steps
I asked the Program ManagerProgram ManagerProgram Managers (formerly Super Deputies) are Program Supporters who can perform extra tasks on WordCamp.org like creating new sites and publishing WordCamps to the schedule. to have a sync meeting before mid-October, so we can discuss and decide together actions and improvements to propose to the team for 2024.
Presentation
We’d love to give everyone the chance to go through the presentation whenever they prefer, so here below you can find a 5 minute video to follow along.
Community Team Engagement Program SupporterProgram SupporterCommunity 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. Survey 2023 – Video Presentation
If the video presentation doesn’t suit you, below is the pdf file:
Please feel free to share any feedback or thoughts related to this analysis in the comments to this post. I want to thank the whole Community Team and each one of its contributors for the passion and caring of their contributions: this has a huge and positive impact on our community.
A special thank you to @mysweetcate for her patience and support while I was working on this analysis.
World Wide Web Day is August 1, 2022. For those who don’t know, this is a global celebration dedicated to web browsing and the inventor behind it, Tim Berners-Lee.
The world wide web revolutionized connection and information sharing, making the world smaller and larger simultaneously. The WordPress mission and community also make the world smaller and larger at the same time!
Because of this, the team at the WP Briefing is seeking to observe WWW Day 2022 with a dedicated podcast episode featuring voices from contributors around the world sharing their experiences with the WordPress community.
To do so they are holding an open call for contribution or nomination!
The WP Briefing podcast is looking for 6-8 contributors of
diverse backgrounds
experiences with WordPress
geographies
to participate in a brief interview via Zoom, Squadcast, or similar web-based platform on their experiences with WordPress.
The interviews will use audio only (not video) and will be featured on the podcast. The theme will be Celebrating World Wide Web Day– WordPress Around the World. What impact has WordPress had in your world? Interviews will take place between July 21-26 (excluding weekend days) and will last 15-30 minutes.
Haven’t heard of the WP Briefing podcast?
This podcast is your chance to explore WordPress with Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the project’s executive director, and guests. Learn about where WordPress is going, how we plan to get there, and how you can get involved. Join today and help democratize publishing!
