Important Update: New Marketing/Advertising Guidelines for WordCamp and WordPress Events

Hello Event Organizers and Community members!

I am excited to announce that the marketing and advertising guidelines have been updated in the WordCamp/WordPress Events handbook! If you are 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., KidsCamp/YouthCamp, or any other innovative WordPress event, you now have the opportunity to allocate a portion of your budget for marketing and advertising.

The goal is to help event organizers reach wider audiences, especially first-time attendees while ensuring efficient use of resources. For full details on how to use these funds, including important information about the WordPress/WordCamp trademark, please review the newly added Advertising/Marketing Expense Guidelines.

Please note that the final amount for marketing and advertising will be approved by a Program ManagerProgram Manager Program 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. during your budget review. If your event is upcoming but your budget review has already taken place, you can still request to add marketing/advertising expenses. Simply send an email to support@wordcamp.org with your proposed amount for consideration and a Program Manager will follow up with you via email.

Thank you, and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further assistance!

Note: Thank you to everyone who participated in the public discussion and made it possible for this change to happen!

#ads, #advertising, #marketing, #new-guideline

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) on February 10, 2021

Summary:

  • Looking for more volunteer and participant signups for the “How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events #WPDiversity: An Interactive, Transformational Watch Party” on February 18th.
  • Shanta is looking for help from our team with promoting the “Great Lakes area: How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events” live workshop on March 4.
  • Our “Creating a Welcoming and Diverse Space” workshop videos are up on Learn. Oneal and Katie are working on items for it.
  • Our team will be holding a work party for people working on items for our group Thurs, Feb 11, 2021 @ 4-5pm Pacific (Friday 12-1am UTC)!
Continue reading

#diversity, #marketing, #wpdiversity

Meetup Organizer Newsletter: December 2020

Hello friends,

Welcome to the December edition of our 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. organizer newsletter! Read on to discover some exciting updates and resources from the WordPress community. 

Newsletter contents

  • State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. 2020
  • WordPress 5.6 release
  • Learn WordPress 
  • Online event updates
  • News and updates

State of the Word 2020

Mark your calendars for the 2020 State of the Word – the annual keynote address of WordPress given by project co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. The event will be streamed on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter on Thursday 17 December  2020, at 16:00 UTC and will have live captioning in multiple languages. Meetup groups around the world are encouraged to host watch parties to celebrate this year’s WordPress accomplishments together! 

Want to ask Matt a question at the State of the Word? Record a video question on your phone or computer in landscape format, and include your name and how you use WordPress in the video. Then, upload the video as an unlisted video on your favorite video hosting site, and send a link to: ask-matt@wordcamp.org.

The deadline to send in your question is 11 December, so don’t delay!

WordPress 5.6 is out!

The latest major WordPress release  – version 5.6 “Simone”, came out on 8 December 2020. The release ships with a new default theme: Twenty Twenty One, and offers features like greater layout flexibility, more blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. patterns, video captioning support, auto-updates, 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.-compatibility for PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. 8.0, application password support for the REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/., updates to jQuery, among others. You can find more information in the field guide

For sites which uses jQuery, to ensure a smooth transition, use the Test jQuery updates plugin to check your site for errors before you update. If you find errors with your site, you can use the jQuery migrate plugin.

The Marketing Team is pulling together resources (Questions and Answers, social media posts you can use, slides, and images) to help meetup groups with WordPress 5.6 outreach. You can find these resources in the Team’s GitHub repository in the coming week. Reach out to the #marketing 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/. channel for more details. 

Learn WordPress is launching soon!

Learn WordPress, the new online, on-demand WordPress training platform, is close to launch has been officially launched! Are you looking for a fun, different way to connect with your local WordPress meetup group? You can ask participants to watch a Learn WordPress workshop and organize a discussion group based on it for your meetup. Or you can simply schedule a watch party based on a workshop and arrange a quick discussion based on the same. Want to help make Learn WordPress more successful? You can apply to organize workshops and discussion groups. Can you help promote Learn WordPress? Contact the Marketing Team for materials.

Online event updates

Use the #OnlineWPMeetup hashtag to promote your online WordPress 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.! You can find all the upcoming online meetups around the globe at: https://make.wordpress.org/community/events/online/.

Don’t forget to use this opportunity to find participants across the world for your meetups too. If you need help with promoting your meetup, reach out to the Marketing Team in the #marketing Slack channel. 

Online 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. updates

  • WordCamp Mexico Online was held from 25-28 November 2020. Check out the event website to catch up with the recorded live stream. Videos of the camp will soon be available on WordPress.tv. Don’t forget to catch up the forthcoming online WordCamps: 
  • WordCamp Sevilla 2020 (26-29 December 2020)
  • WordCamp India 2021 (30-31 January, 6-7 February, and 14-15 February 2021)

Featured Meetup: WordPress Sofia Meetup

The WordPress Sofia meetup group has been organizing lectures, workshops, and themed community meetups to facilitate community connections, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a lockdown was enforced in Bulgaria, the meetup group pivoted online with sessions to support the community, including COVID-19 tips, finding customers from home, email marketing, community development from home, and more. These sessions were held on Zoom and uploaded to YouTube. The group continued their experiments with online events — community members showcased their homes/workplaces during their summer meetups — and they invited members from the larger WordPress community to their other meetups. The group continues to meet online twice a month, and record and upload their meetups to YouTube.

Reimagining the work of the Diverse Speaker Training group

The Diversity Speaker Training group of the Community team wants your feedback on how they can reimagine their work in light of the ongoing world changes this year and in 2021. Please share your feedback as comments on the post by 18 December 2020.

News and updates

Meetup organizers can now request Community Zoom Pro accounts for their local meetup events! In order to get a Zoom Pro account for your meetup, submit a request using the zoom requests form at least a week before your event.


If you have any questions, Community Team deputiesProgram Supporter Community 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. are available to help. Please send an email to support@wordcamp.org or join the #community-events Slack channel. Thanks for everything you do to grow the WordPress community. Let’s keep sharing knowledge and inspiring each other with our contributions! 

We will see you online soon!


#meetup-organizer-newsletter
#newsletter

The following people contributed to this edition of the Meetup newsletter: @andreamiddleton @angelasjin and @webcommsat

Report: Diverse Speaker Workshops and Train the Trainers October 2020

The Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) normally trains WordPress 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. organizers how to hold their own Diverse Speaker workshop in order to increase how many speaker applications they get from people from marginalized and underrepresented groups.

During the pandemic, the team is delivering the workshop to the global WordPress community online ourselves. We are also starting to slowly reintroduce the original trainings for organizers as people’s bandwidth is slowly increasing.

Each month, we are reporting at the tag #DiverseSpeakerWorkshopsReports how these workshops and trainings are going.

October 2020

Discussion Group

In October, we ran our first Discussion Groups based on the workshops we have uploaded to Learn WordPress.

These are the stats for the 3 groups run by @jillbinder in October. Others have begun running discussions as well. (The stats for the others are not yet available at this time.)

Number who attended: 11
From number of cities: 10
From number of countries: 4 (Thailand, Spain, Costa Rica, United States)

Increase in public speaking confidence after taking the workshops: 11%

Training event organizers

Normally, our team holds frequent trainings teaching WP 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., WordCamps, and now other WP online event organizers how to run the Diverse Speaker workshops. (“Hold Your Own Diverse Speaker Workshop” or “Train the Trainers”).

In October, we held one session.

Number who attended: 0

Upcoming in November

A reminder that we are holding an Intermediate workshop series November 17 – 19, 2020. For people from marginalized or underrepresented groups in WordPress who have spoken at least once before, or who have not spoken yet and are willing to dive deeper.

Special topic on November 19, 2020: Story-telling for tech talks

Read more and sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/intermediate-wordpress-diverse-speaker-workshops-november-2020-tickets-125564150755

Please help us spread the word! Share the link above, or help us reshare social media posts which will be put out by the #marketing team this coming week.

#diversespeakerworkshopsreports, #wpdiversity

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) on October 14, 2020

Attending: @jillbinder @cguntur @gissane @tantienhime @angelasjin @webcommsat @nalininonstopnewsuk

Start: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1602694969417300

Working group Community badges proposal

https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/10/13/proposal-community-contributor-badges-for-working-group-members/

All attending agreed that this is a great idea. If this is something you’d like to see, we’d love your support on the post.

People asked how to get the various badges. @angelasjin shared documentation on how badges are assigned.

Workshops background

Explaining to new volunteers how our workshops work. We explained what we normally do and what experiments we have been trying during the pandemic. We had a big discussion here, answering many questions, and people shared their success stories. <3

How our latest workshop discussions have gone

In October, we tried out using the Learn WordPress discussion format.

Day 1: 2 attendees + 5 mentorsEvent 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. + 1 assistant
Day 2: 1 attendee + 3 mentors
Day 3: 3 attendees + 3 mentors + 1 assistant

Two attendees watched the video in advance, but only one watched the correct video. (He knew this, he just ran out of time.)

Thank you to our mentors, which really helped for answering harder questions, giving tips, helping to keep the discussion going, and jumping in for getting assistance in their own talks, even:
@dani418 @allienimmons @volkswagenchick @sparklingrobots @angelasjin, @pastelito, Amina

A big thank you to the #marketing team for all of their hard work in promoting the discussions: @webcommsat@nalininonstopnewsuk, @lmurillom, and others!

Being a discussion facilitator is an easy way to help out. We have pre-written starter questions for you.

Upcoming discussions, training, and workshops planned

October 24:  Teaching 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 WP event organizers how to hold our workshops. @miriamgoldman is playing our training videos and facilitating the group.

@angelasjin is running these discussions coming up:

I’m running an intermediate speaker series:

  • Tues, Nov 17: Improving your pitch
  • Wed, Nov 18: Intermediate online stage presence
  • Thurs, Nov 19: Story-telling: How to make a story out of a tech topic

Watch for the sign-up info coming soon at https://make.wordpress.org/community/tag/wpdiversityworkshops/

People asked how they can help promote these. @webcommsat and @nalininonstopnewsuk shared:

Follow #WPDiversity on:

Volunteer opportunities

  1. Discussion facilitators
  2. Workshop mentors
  3. Workshop assistants (for background admin items)
  4. A little need: A meeting reminder-er. As far as we know, there isn’t a way to automate them on the channel we are speaking on right now. So a person who can go in and manually put reminders here!

https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/09/25/call-for-volunteers-the-diverse-speaker-training-group/

End: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1602699185035000

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#WPDiversity) on September 23, 2020

Summary: We talked about how the September intermediate workshop series went last week, upcoming workshops/trainings/discussions September through November, help needed, and the start of our Spanish translations.

Continue reading

#marketing, #wpdiversity

Forming the WordCamp Central Twitter account working group

I think that the WordCamp Central Twitter account is too silent, official and boring. Currently, the only content is automatically shared from central.wordcamp.org news. It would be awesome to raise local communities and their WordCamps more in the content of that account. One way of doing this could be re-tweeting curated content.

Birgit Pauli-Haack and contributors did write an awesome proposal about this in 2017 and feedback on that proposal was enthusiastic. After the proposal, activating the Twitter account didn’t get enough momentum because of a lack of interested contributors.

The proposal from 2017 is still valid and could be a good starting point for activating the Twitter account today. The missing part is contributors who want to commit to updating the account actively.

That’s why I’m calling all persons interested in contributing to this topic to express their interest in the comments. If we get at least six interested and tentatively committed contributors, we’ll start a working group.

The first task for the working group will be scheduling a video meeting where the plan for reactivating the Twitter account will be discussed. The next steps will be agreed on that call.

#marketing, #twitter, #working-group

Recap of the Diverse Speaker Training group (#wpdiversity) on Oct. 23, 2019

Attending: @jillbinder @miriamgoldman @mariaojob @rahuldsarker @bhargavmehta @aurooba

Start: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1571850072235500

Today’s Agenda:

  1. Reports
  2. Our internal workshop this weekend
  3. Stats collection
  4. WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. 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/.
  5. Upcoming end of daylight savings time affects the meeting time for some of us
  6. Open discussion

Reports

What are you working on? How is it going? Do you have any obstacles? With colour:

  • Green: on plan. No help needed.
  • Yellow: not on plan but I have a strategy to get there
  • Red: not on plan, no plan to get there, I’m lost!

@miriamgoldman
I’m green: Talked about our group at 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. Niagara (plugged it in my talk), am digitizing my role as team lead for Train the Trainers, and have outlined with Angela our “Train the DeputiesProgram Supporter Community 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.” sessions we are running next month.

Green in that we have scheduled training sessions up to December.

@jillbinder: With @aurooba starting marketing very soon and with our promotions at WCUS, we are expecting our number of 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. wanting training to be increasing soon!

Exciting times. We’re in the transition between our two phases and things are about to get exciting.

@miriamgoldman: That’s fantastic. Once we see the demand go up, I’ll reach out to the individuals who want to become trainers themselves, and start onboarding them. And obviously fill in gaps myself where need be. (so it’s not just Angela and I trying to squeeze things in!)

@jillbinder: Since it’s happening soon, it would be a good idea to be onboarding them sooner… So that they’ll be ready or almost ready by the time they’re needed.

@miriamgoldman: Good call @jillbinder. I’m swamped this week, but will reach out early next week


@rahuldsarker and @bhargavmehta
Had discussion with our team for translation of documentation. They suggested everything can be translated. We can start off with the small test this week.

@jillbinder: That’s perfect as the new full material will be ready soon.


@cguntur
I sent a message to Jeremy and told him that I will wait for him to send me the Calendly details for the Speaker 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. program.

I am working on the 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. Care stuff and will be sending out a bunch of emails to meetups who have taken the training to start getting our stats updated.


@miriamgoldman for @angelasjin
I can semi report for Angela, in that she has two people signed up for a training (regular Train the Trainers) in November.

Our internal workshop this weekend

We are recording the workshop straight up, as if it were a real class. No stopping to explain facilitator notes. I’ll be recording those separately. (But you can always send me questions in 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/. after.)

It’ll be a piece of the “choose your own training” we’re creating. If they want to see how any part is done, they can watch that module.

A reminder: our sound was not good in our previous training.

Let’s have a great recording: Please at a minimum wear headphones and be at the best internet connection you can.
It’s preferable if you can also be using a headset or have a microphone.

We won’t be using the chat, as that won’t translate well for the recording. If you’re participating in any exercise, it’ll be on the video and audio. (I know in some countries you won’t be able to do to video, and that’s fine. It’s preferable if you can, but not at the expense of the recording quality.)

You’ll be taking the class as though you are someone actually taking it. Working through Impostor Syndrome, coming up with a talk topic, writing your pitch, title, outline, bio.

You can opt out of anything, and if you do want to opt out, it’ll be fine as it’ll be an example of how people can opt out in real life, too.

They opt out by saying “Pass” in the exercises.

Ideally I’d want almost everyone participating, please! I want to show how the exercises actually work.

As it’s a 4-5 hour workshop, we have it split into the 2 days, Saturday is half and Sunday is half.

I set it for 2.5 hours each day. I’m finding that online that amount of time is a good balance.

It should be in your google calendars, but just a reminder that it’s 10am-12:30pm Pacific time.

If anyone in our team hasn’t signed up for it yet, you still can!

It would be great to have as many of us as possible closely familiar with what we do by having done it.

One last thing I can think of right now: It would be great to have a timestamp of when the title slide of each of the 6 modules comes up on the screen, to make it easy to separate the modules into different videos later.
Who would be willing to mark down the times of the 6 module title slides?

@miriamgoldman: I’ll do it if no one else volunteers.

@jillbinder: That sounds good, Miriam. It’ll be great to have more people involved, and if no one does, I will call on you for it!

Stats collection

Last time I talked about getting our stats early this year (which cities/countries meetups have taken the training, where have run it, how have their WordCamp speaker stats changed) so that it is a possible contender to be included in Matt’s State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/..

@cguntur has started sending out the first question to those who have been trained or have indicated that they will run it on their own. Thanks, @cguntur! Hoping we can have as much data as possible by end of the week to submit in. (But if people respond after the end of the week, please still let me know those.)

WCUS Contributor day

As far as I know there are 2 major items our team will be working on on WCUS Contributor day. Let’s start on the first: Marketing items.

There won’t be many from our team specifically there that day, but we will have access to other eager volunteers who will love to help.

@aurooba: By the end of today I’ll have documents set up for the big things we want to get drafts done for by WCUS, I’ll share in slack and everyone who wants to pitch in can add suggestions, etc.

@jillbinder: I like that idea of getting our suggestions etc ahead of time.

@aurooba: Yes! And anyone who wants to pitch in virtually the day of can as well. Or any other time

@jillbinder: Oh yes, a few said they’d be available that day. That is so good.

@aurooba: I’ll be sure to give a heads up on our team slack, and there will undoubtedly be relevant conversation happening in the #marketing channel

@aurooba: The marketing plan is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wlv75QpVVkMqJrpw8M18nya4_iWGMOHUpzfPvM_U954
We are focusing on the first 2-3 items plus an email to add to the automation for organizers.

The other item is getting started on creating the self-guided training material for the Community Team out of our “Creating a Welcoming and Diverse Space” WCUS workshop.

I still need to check in if the other workshop facilitators of our group will be available. It’ll be even better if they are, but even if they aren’t, we’ll still certainly be able to start.

If we can’t do both for whatever reason, the Marketing items will take priority.

@aurooba: The recording will be helpful to work with afterwards as well

@jillbinder: Ohh! Awesome! How do you think we might use it?

@aurooba: Just in terms of creating the self paced version with the help of others besides the facilitators

@rahuldsarker: Once the translation is complete. Can we translate the full material as a video. How is that idea?

@jillbinder: That’s an interesting idea, @rahuldsarker! I like your innovative thinking. It’s really important for our work to have as many text translations of the workshop as possible.

I get the sense that it would be valuable for your community in particular to have the video version… So if you think it won’t interfere with communicating with the #polyglots to get more language translations done, then we can consider it.

Upcoming end of daylight savings time affects the meeting time for some of us

I get confused every year of which times change for who and when, but fyi, TIMES ARE CHANGING.

We go by UTC time for our meetings, so in most of North America for example our next meeting will be an hour earlier.

I trust everyone to be responsible for their own times. Check when is 5pm UTC where you are.

Open Discussion

Anything relating to our work & team you’d like to talk about in our last few min?

@miriamgoldman: Not really. Excited for the workshop this weekend.

@jillbinder: Just got a notice of a first meetup training planned for 2020. Woohoo!

Alright, thanks all! I adore you. Thank you for all you do, and for coming to me when things are hard or stuck as well. It’s important. See some of you at WCUS and speak with the rest of you soon.

End: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1571853657310500

#wpdiversity

Recap of the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training meeting on June 26, 2019

Attending: @jillbinder @angelasjin @cguntur @amyjune @rahuldsarker

Start: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1561568532050800

Agenda

  • Reports
  • Announcement from Automattic of my sponsorship for this work
  • My video
  • Current stats
  • Where we’re at with the first train the trainers today
  • Test and recording with team
  • Update on Translations
  • Where we’re at in our roadmap

Reports

(Includes folks who sent me their reports ahead of time.)

@miriamgoldman
I’m holding a train the trainers this afternoon.

@angelasjin
I think I need to schedule a train the trainers session for August? I need to sort out my schedule (I’ll get there) and would like to confer with other trainers to see what time would be most effective. And I recall some updating of our trainings, but I’m a bit behind on what that looks like.

@cguntur
I am planning to attend the train the trainers session this afternoon!

@simo70
The Verona 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. went well. I talked about myths, how to find an idea, write a bio and make good slides. I could not continue with the Italian translations.

@aurooba
I don’t have an update on marketing stuff as of right now.

@rahuldsarker
Rahul joined the team in our meeting today and has 10 hours a week to contribute. Welcome!

Announcement from Automattic of my sponsorship for this work

It is now officially public knowledge: Automattic posted last week about supporting this work with giving me a 50% sponsorship to lead the team!

Want to See a More Diverse WordPress Contributor Community? So Do We.

Also Matt posted about it on his blog, and I am so happy about that too:

Diversifying WordPress

My video

I have a video about the impact that this work has. It is promoting my new business to take this work outside of WordPress, but everything up until the end is all about this project. It’s only 3 min so give it a watch to see what we’ve accomplished. It is mighty impressive!

Current stats

As we are having our first train the trainers since the reboot this afternoon, I thought I’d share where our stats are before that. We did have the team going for the first couple of months in the year, so that is where these come from.

We trained 5 cities:

  • Ahmedabad, India
  • Torino, Italy
  • Sevilla, Spain
  • Portland (I think?), USA
  • Milan, Italy

4 cities have run the training:

  • Torino, Italy
  • Portland (I think?), USA
  • Milan, Italy
  • Vancouver, BC

It’s a solid start. With our new processes that’ll make everything easier and with @aurooba heading up our marketing (with the help of the #marketing team), we are going to be doing a lot more.

Where we’re at with Train the Trainers

For those who are new, Train the Trainers is where we walk chapter meetup organizers through our workshop material. We were running them 1-2 times a month and starting today we are doing them again at about this schedule.

We currently have one scheduled for June. That is later today at 5-7pm Eastern time.

You can still sign up for it by going to https://tiny.cc/wpdiversity

It was my intention to get the new processes started before today’s training.

What is done:

A couple of new fields on the form. We want to have people book a training after they have scheduled a workshop at their meetup. In the future we’ll have more info so that they can decide they want to do it and create their meetup in advance. As we don’t have that in place yet, I put the fields in but optionally for now.

What isn’t done:

I wanted to have our calendly ready to test out people choosing a training with it, and seeing how it does with sending out the various reminders and info. But it turns out I needed people who own that account to do things to set me up, and 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. Europe got in the way of that. So I’ll be able to talk to the person who can help me today and get that going.

Test and recording with team

While I’m putting together the “long” and “short” versions of the workshop, I’ve been working on smoothing out the workshop material. I would like to test out a new “writing your biography” exercise.

I would like help from 6 folks on Zoom calls with me sometime in the next couple of weeks, please. Three to test old way and then new way
and three to test new way and then old way.

Let me know here or in the comments of the recap if you can do this, please!

Volunteered in the meeting: @cguntur, @angelasjin, @amyjune

And on recording

This is a long heads-up that in a few months (I need to check when on the roadmap) as part of the new Train the Trainers to teach the new, easier workshop, I will want to have a recording of people taking the workshop that 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. can watch.

And I would like as many members of our group to be on that, please. Partly so that we’ve all taken it, and partly because it’ll be a great contribution to the project.

It’ll likely be two 2-hour sessions, each a week apart.

I will send out a scheduling poll to us soon for the full workshop sessions so that we can have folks schedule around being able to attend.

Update on Translations

Quick update on Translations. Our mini Translations team is no longer available to do the speaker training workshop and train the trainers translations into other languages.

But the good news is, we have an entire WordPress team available to us to pick it up. The #polyglots team.

So I will:

  • reach out to that team soon
  • start communicating now what our needs will be in a couple of months when the long and short workshops are available
  • check in on what kind of schedule they would like re: how many translations over how many months

I would love to have a co-lead for communicating with #polyglots about Translations with me. Who would be willing do this ongoing project with me?

@rahuldsarker
I can translate to Bangali, our local language.

Where we’re at in our roadmap

I think I was overeager when I created the June plan, and so not all is done. June isn’t over and there is time to do more! but I will update where each item is at.

[Material] Improving the training based on the feedback from email questionnaires and things Jill has learned

Yes – I am doing this on the future long and short workshops. But I also want to get essential items into the current workshop and I haven’t done that yet.

fyi we have a new team member, @incredimike, who is going to do the githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ requests on the #training team’s system for these changes.

[Promotion] Create a shorter team name

Done! Woohoo!
[Team] Publish roadmap; Recruit more volunteers

Roadmap published and it included the call out for volunteers. We’ve had a few new since then!
[Trainers] Get us using new systems (calendly, require they’ve created a meetup for it, email questionnaire)

This was ambitious and not yet done. I hope to get calendly going this week. The other 2 are big jobs.
[Trainers] Schedule first new training(s) starting in June

Yes! @miriamgoldman is doing one later today. :thumbsup:
[Trainers] Start giving trainings again, 1-2 times a month

Yes, and we need to schedule out for July and August. Right now I think we have 2 active trainers, @miriamgoldman and @angelasjin. I can jump in as needed. We have a few more folks who are wanting to be trainers, so let’s get them ready soon.

It’s a bit tricky while we’re in the middle of changing our processes, but we’ll see what we can do.

Miriam and Angela, you might be needed a bit more frequently in the next couple of months before we get more folks on board.
I’ll chat with you both out of the meeting.
[Trainers] Jill record a short video on what this is

Ambitious and not yet done.
[Andrea, Jill, Trainers / Promotion] Create new email questionnaire follow-up system and/or Zoom interviews; Send it out to previous facilitators; Start collecting case studies for marketing ?

Very ambitious and not yet done.

That is the June list!

@angelasjin: That’s a really ambitious list, and even though everything isn’t checked off, a lot of great work was done! So, awesome job!

Upcoming items on the roadmap:

June – July

[Translations] Translating the workshop and materials to Brazilian Portuguese and Italian
[Trainers] Contact past attendees and dormant emails (not responded in several months) to let the new speaker wranglers this year know about workshop and see if they’d like training
[Trainers] Contact past attendees to see if they’d like to take it again
[Trainers] Contact past attendees for their info for the “Past Workshops Celebration” page
[Jill] Communication and accountability system

July

[Promotion] Jill finish Build Speaker Roster essay
[Promotion] Put the workshop into the materials for WordCamp Speaker wranglers and the Meetups info
[Training, Promotion] Create a “Past Workshops Celebration” page on Make WordPress that shows images, stats, and maybe stories of each workshop

The ongoing items are going well.

Except that I missed the June newsletter workshop deadline by a bit and so they didn’t publish the new testimonial and info about today’s training. We have sorted out a system so that that won’t happen again next month.

Next Actions

  1. All on team, watch my 3 min video to see the impressive work we’ve done so far. (Ignore the end that is promo for taking the work outside of WordPress.) https://diversein.tech/video/
  2. Anyone on our team or any meetup organizers can still sign up for the Train the Trainers later today at 5-7pm Eastern time. https://tiny.cc/wpdiversity
  3. Jill finishing calendly setup this week.
  4. I need 6 volunteers to do a one-hour call with me to test the new biography exercise. Three signed up today. Three more please!
  5. Jill schedule the biography testing calls with the volunteers.
  6. Jill create poll to schedule when as many people as possible on our team can attend a recording session of our whole workshop to use in our training material. Aiming for September.
  7. I would love to have a co-lead for communicating with #polyglots about Translations with me. Who would be willing do this ongoing project with me?
  8. Translations follow up with @rahuldsarker about future Bangali translation
  9. Jill talk to @miriamgoldman and @angelasjin about upcoming Training schedule
  10. Training team talk about onboarding the rest of future Trainers

End: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1561571805113300

#wpdiversity

Community Team Slack Channels

Hi all,

I want to propose that we rename #outreach to #community-team and follow CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and 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. in their sub team channel naming convention which for the Community team would be #community-usage.

For example, the events room would be renamed to #community-events. The way 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/. works means that any channel name changes will not effect or kick anyone out of any room they are currently a part of, just that they will see the name has changed.

Part of the reason why is because many people who are looking for the community team do not look or realise we are in #outreach. This includes a core committer who i would label as an advance Slack user. In fact, when I told them the community team uses #outreach for our community channel their response was

Oh, that’s what that channel is
Weird
I’d expect #community and #community-usage
#events I can see potentially being different
But #outreach I always thought was like for engagement with the wider community
Kinda like #marketing

They also pointed out that when searching for a channel, people automatically search for community and get a response of No match found. Did you spell it correctly?

Screenshot of the result when you type Community into the Slack channel search. It responds with No match found. Did you spell it correctly?

I have also noticed that the #outreach gets messages regarding people doing outreach for their products. Although not often, the mistake is understandable considering what the channel is called. Back when 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/ took to Slack, we were called #community – but many people thought it was a water-cooler location for anyone to have a natter. This was the reasoning behind the switch to #outreach. Instead, I would like to propose we call it #community-team which makes it clear that the channel is for the Community team.

The other reason why I would like to propose these changes is because I’ve been trying to get into updating the handbook, but it’s a really boring process to do on your own and talking about it in #events or #outreach, the conversation gets lost in all the other conversations that are happening in there.

I think that the Core team and the Meta team’s use of #team-thing has meant that conversations are kept focused on the channel topic. It allows for people to only follow conversations that they are interested in and helps with the timezone issue where we have people across the world wanting to follow one particular topic.

At a minimum i can in vision the following channels

It could be extended to – if people feel like it could be helpful to 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. mentorsEvent 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. #community-mentors – a support location for people mentoring WordCamps in a similar vein to the forum support for the moderators.

And later maybe #community-deputies – a support location for people who are doing deputyProgram Supporter Community 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. work in a similar vein to #community-mentors. It would also give a clearer view of what it is that deputiesProgram Supporter Community 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. do for anyone wanting to join the deputy program as they can see the things deputies discuss and talk about.

All these channels will still be accessible to everyone so there is no issue with transparency.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this.

Jenny

#deputies