There are some specialized events that we have talked about standardizing/supporting/organizing through this team that we haven’t really had a structure for because we were stuck in the habit of thinking of two extremes: a two-hour 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. event, or a full weekend 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.. Many of us have been involved with events that fall somewhere in the middle – full day workshops, hackathons, contributor days, etc. – but without resources in place for how to handle these things, there has been confusion about what support is available, what to call things, and in some cases, even what’s allowed.

I’d like to start formalizing some of these event types and creating documentation (event guides) to make it easy for people want to organize them to get started. A lot of these have happened in multiple locations already, with each location putting their own spin on things and a variable level of documentation. For the sake of getting something together that we can put into a Meetup organizers handbook with instructions on what’s involved with each event type, I’d like to get a few people willing to put on an event and document the process so that we can start building our library of event guides. To that end…

Charity Hackathon
@hlashbrooke has run several charity hackathons in South Africa, where volunteers build sites for nonprofit organizations. This is something that also has happened at a number of WordCamps, as well as through Meetup groups or as standalone independent events. This event type is much simpler than a WordCamp, but requires more support than a 1 to 2 hour meetup (for example, a full-day venue rental is harder to get donated). He will be partnering with Erica Kuschel from Austin to put on one of these events in Austin this April, and he will create a draft event guide to help other people organize the same kind of event.

Note: We will want to come up with a standard name for describing this kind of event. there are some connotations with the word charity that make it less appealing for some people, and similarly the word hackathon has been known to alienate people who are not hard-coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. developers. For this event, Hugh will be using the name 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., which he has used at past events, but we might need a clearer, more general label for the event guide that. Community build-a-thon? Suggestions welcome in the comments.

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/./Weekend
Doing a standalone contributor day (or weekend) is something quite a few communities have done successfully, and in some cases on a regular basis. I know that @miss_jwo created documentation for this event type on independent site, and there are several members of this team who have organized contributor days in the past. It would be great to see who is interested in taking point on/contributing to an official event guide, and go from there. I’m also doing half day contributor thing as part of the support team contributor weekend this Saturday, so if anyone else is organizing something for that weekend, maybe we could pool our thoughts and experiences.

Full-Day Workshops
There have been so many of these, and yet we don’t have any documentation on what’s involved in running one. New user workshops, theme-building workshops, speaker skills workshops… Within the full day workshop categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging., there are quite a few variations so it would be great to develop an event planning guide for each type. This particular event type would be supported by the training scripts being developed on the training team for standardized curriculums, for the sake of an event guide we are mostly concerned with the logistics of planning and running the event. Is there anyone who would like to take point on the event guides for this event type? I have done several full-day workshops as have many others, so I think there’s plenty of information available, it’s just a matter of getting it all together in one place. This event type would also include workshops for specialized audiences such as kids, senior citizens, veterans, etc. If no one volunteers to take point on this, we’ll create it after we do our pilot workshops (Feb-March) to prepare for a one-day workshop with Hack the Hood this spring.

Are there other full-day events that you’ve done (or seen others do) that would benefit from an event guide? Tell us in the comments!

#community-management, #documentation, #event-types