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. Guidelines – August 19 Update

Since you last heard from us, the members of this committee ran into life, that is to say: WordCamps, jobs, local WordPress community obligations. Life has been fun, busy, and full of a lot of WordPress. As it should be 🙂

Consequently, we haven’t gotten through all the steps that we laid out for ourselves when we last posted an update for you guys here and here and here.

We’re sorry, especially since we know you all want to know the results of our findings. So, we met last week to figure out where we are at and what we need to do going forward.

This is what we’ve come up with:

some guidelines are frustrating for some organizers, other guidelines are frustrating to other organizers. We all have our guidelines that provide varying levels of pain. The main thing we want as WordCamp organizers is to know why things are the way they are. Arbitrary rules bother us.

To be clear, we discovered during our conversations and through the results of the survey we sent out that the biggest pain point is *not knowing the reason for a given guideline*. Speaking for myself, as a 3 time WordCamp organizer (and since we are all reasonable people) if we knew the reason behind a given guideline, then we may still be frustrated, but we could all work with that.

Consequently, our recommendation is for more transparency, specifically:

• document the guidelines well, indicating the underlying reasons for why a particular guideline exists
• have quarterly Ask me Anything Google hangouts with someone at Central, essentially, a time for anyone to stop on by and ask questions about anything that is causing any issues

Thanks for listening and sorry for our long absence!

#review-wordcamp-guidelines

Review 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. Guidelines Committee Update #4

We’re adding a deadline: February 28th. We’ll send 2 more emails, once per week.

So far we have received 48 responses to the survey. We need to remind email recipients to send the link to other organizers on their planning teams.

Next steps?

1. Analyze the data:

• read through the responses
• identify the most named pain points
• establish 4 ? 5 categories to organize
• analyze open ended responses for things we may have missed

2. Line-up participants for next survey:

• identify folks that want to be a part of the future surveys

3. Post results March 1st

Team todo list:

• start reviewing our fancy spreadsheet that the form is feeding into,
• post to 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. about the review guidelines project and encourage anyone who didn’t get the email to get in touch

Sample data:

We value the data we’re collecting and hope to make good decisions based on the community’s input.

For instance, from the data so far, we see that 46% of the respondents are new, and only 29% of organizers appear to continue to engage in the organization of camps.

Then we see that 54% of the respondents donÂ’t feel that the guidelines are that bad, but 17% feel itÂ’s pretty flawed.. obviously this is something we better understand.

#review-wordcamp-guidelines

Review 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. Guidelines Committee Update #3

Our preliminary list of WordCamp Guidelines pain points was compiled and emailed to recipients on February 5th.

At this point, we’re waiting for the replies to our survey to come in. Once we get them all, we’ll move to putting together the next survey based on the responses we’ve received.

If any WordCamp organizer did *not* get the invitation to fill out the survey, please post a comment here we can send it to you again.

Here is the content of the form we sent:

When did you organize your WordCamp? *
(The current WordCamp guidelines were introduced in May 2011.)

• Before May 2011
• In or after May 2011
• I’ve organized camps both before and after May 2011

How do you feel about the guidelines?* *

• I think they’re perfect
• I think they need to be explained better
• I think they are ok but need some changes
• I think they are pretty flawed and need a lot of changes
• I think they need to be totally scrapped
• I think there should be not be any guidelines for WordCamps

Please identify which (if any) of the following were ‘pain points’ for you in the course of organizing your WordCamp *

• The existence of the WordCamp guidelines at all. Period (Full stop).
• Dealing with leftover funds
• Having to organise a not for profit event
• Requiring speakers/sponsors/organizers/volunteers to be 100% GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples.
• Requiring speakers/sponsors/organizers/volunteers to respect the trademark
• Having to apply to organize
• Not being able to organize all by myself (being asked to have a team)
• Being asked to work with/within the local 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.

(if applicable) Having to run the money through the Foundation

• Getting our venue approved by 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.
• Getting our Budget approved by WordCamp Central
• Getting our date approved by WordCamp Central
• Sharing a budget with WordCamp Central
• Having to limit the ticket price to $20 USD (or equivalent) per person, per day
• Having to host the site on WordCamp.org
• Using WordCamp Base theme
• Using the wordcamp.org email address
• Getting our sponsorship packages approved by WordCamp Central
• Limiting the commercialization of the WordCamp
• Keeping speakers local
• Getting a diverse speaker list (including women and people of colour)
• Not allowing logos on shirts
• Being asked to Video record the event
• Only allowing giveaways from sponsors
• Having to return lanyards
• Sending swag to Central
• Having Central vet sponsors
• Other:

• Have you anything you’d like to add to the conversation?

All responses in the survey will be kept confidential and won’t be shared. You are welcome to file this survey anonymously if you wish, but if you would be willing to continue getting deeper this conversation with us, please leave us your email address so we may follow up with you. Our intention is for this to be the first step in a series of progressively more focused inquiries about the effect of the WordCamp guidelines on WordCamps and WordCamp organizers.

#review-wordcamp-guidelines

Review 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. Guidelines Committee Update #2

We are in the final stages of compiling a list of pain points that will be sent out to WordCamp organizers.

We were originally going to send out a small list and dig deeper from there, but decided to send out a list of things we know are issues and ask the WC Organizer community to tell us which ones are more contentious for them.

We will include space for additional pain points that we didn’t think of.

The list will be reviewed by the whole team by Friday, January 31st and ready for distribution on Monday, February 4th.

We’ll also poll non-WordCamp organizers about possible barriers to entry for them in the guidelines.

#review-wordcamp-guidelines

Review 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. Guidelines Committee Update

We’ve taken a few weeks to get into the swing of things. We’ve been tasked with:

• looking at the current WordCamp guidelines to go over pain points and come up with a list
• reaching out to organizers to solicite feedback
• taking a look at any guidelines issues and comparing the issues to the reasons behind the guidelines
• putting together our recommendations

Here’s an update of what we’ve done so far:

• Divided guidelines into 4 main topics: tickets and finances, venue, sponsors, vetting
• Reviewed current guidelines in those sections
• Complied a list of WordCamp organizers to send surveys to

We’re in the process of:

• compiling a short survey that fits into the main topics: tickets and finances, venue, sponsors, vetting

In the coming weeks we will be sending an initial survey to our list of WC organizers.

We’ll put the results together from this first survey, analyze the feedback, and work on a more detailed survey to dig into the pain points that we discover.

#review-wordcamp-guidelines