Tag Archives: wp15

Hugh Lashbrooke 10:38 am on May 16, 2018
Tags: , wp15   

Meetup Organiser Newsletter: 16 May 2018

Howdy 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!

Welcome to another meetup organizer newsletter full of news, information and inspiration for your local meetup.

Newsletter contents:

  • WordPress 15th Anniversary
  • Data privacy tools coming to WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.
  • Speaker training workshops held around the world
  • 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 live stream

WordPress Turns 15 This Month!

On May 27, WordPress will turn 15 years old — meetup groups all over the world are celebrating this auspicious occasion, and it’s sure to be a fun month! Some of the celebrations have already taken place, but many more are on the way over the course of the month.

There’s still time to request some unique 15th Anniversary swag for your event, but we can’t guarantee that it will arrive before May 27. No matter where you are in the world, however, you can always print your own WP15 swag.

If you want your event to show up on the WP15 website, all you need to is make sure that is scheduled for sometime between now and June 10, and that ‘WP15’ or ‘Anniversary’ is mentioned in your event title.

Don’t forget to share pictures of your celebration and your WordPress memories using the hashtag #WP15, and join the worldwide celebration! Check out the #WP15 stream at wp15.wordpress.net/live.

Data Privacy tools are Coming to WordPress Core

The upcoming release of WordPress (v4.9.6, scheduled for May 17) will include a number updates to privacy and information storage options. This is important for all WordPress site owners to take note of, as it will assist you in making sure that your site is legally accessible from across Europe once GDPR comes into effect.

You can follow updates about the data privacy and transparency features on the Core team blog — this is a good opportunity to talk to your local meetup group about data privacy and transparency concerns with their websites and how to manage them with the new European regulations as well as other privacy standards from all over the world.

Speaker Training Workshops Held around the World

Have you ever had trouble getting women and people from other groups underrepresented in tech to speak at your 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 WordCamps? Check out the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training workshop: https://make.wordpress.org/training/speaker-training

Variations of this workshop have been run in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Montréal, New York City, Toronto, and Brighton, and each community had a significant increase in the number of WordCamp speakers who identify as women.

Vancouver and Montréal have had at least 50% for 3 years in a row, and in 2017 Seattle had the highest ratio so far, with 60% women speakers.

We are starting to run more regular trainings. Last week the community team’s working group trained 11 cities! Places that have run it since the last WordPress Meetups newsletter went out include:

  • Milan, Italy
  • Turin, Italy
  • Hamilton, ON, Canada
  • Bellingham, WA, USA

Did we miss you? Have you run it this year? Are you interested in running it? Let us know here: http://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak

Watch the WordCamp Europe Live Stream with your Local Community

WordCamp Europe 2018 is happening on June 14-16 and, to allow people all over the world to enjoy the great content, the organising team is opening up a live stream of the event.

This live stream will available for free all over the world, making it a great opportunity to get your local community together to watch it. To help you out we have created an event template on meetup.com titled “WordCamp Europe Live Stream Party” — you can use that to create and schedule your event. If you need to rent a venue for a WordCamp viewing party, you can apply for financial assistance by making a Meetup Venue Approval Request.

Subscribe to the WordCamp Europe website for updates about how to access the live stream when it goes live.

 

That’s it for now — chat to you next time!

Your friends on the Community Team
make.wordpress.org/community

#meetups-2

Andrea Middleton 6:18 pm on April 27, 2018
Tags: wp15   

Call for Moderators: WP15 needs your help!

Social media posts with the hashtag #WP15 are being aggregated and displayed on wp15.wordpress.net/live between now and mid-June, yay!!! It’s fun to see people all over the world celebrating the 15th anniversary of WordPress, and it’s great that we’re archiving all this content for posterity and nostalgia. 🙂

Cool!

We think so too! We’d love you to tweet about the 15th anniversary too! Unfortunately, some sexually explicit content has shown up on the hashtag in the past month, so the site is now sending all possible posts to a Pending list, so someone can review each post before it’s published to wp15.wordpress.net.

How can I help?

We need moderators to help us make sure that all the content displayed on the anniversary site relates to WordPress and is appropriate for all audiences.

What do I have to do?

Depending on how many people volunteer, the time commitment is 5-15 minutes per day, every 1-2 days between now and June, to check the Pending list and publish all the tweets/instas/flickrs that relate to the 15th anniversary of WordPress (and don’t have adult content).

Probably the highest volume of posts will come over the weekend of May 27, so ideally volunteers can help on that weekend especially.

Skills requirements: knowing how to publish a Pending post in WordPress and how to distinguish between adult vs general content.

I’m in! How do I sign up?

Comment on this post, and a 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. will contact you, add you to the site, and you can get moderating! 🙂

 

Do you have questions or concerns that weren’t answered above? 🙂 Leave them in a comment below!

 

Hugh Lashbrooke 5:44 am on April 17, 2018
Tags: wp15   

Meetup Organiser Newsletter: 16 April 2018

Over the last few months we have started sending regular newsletters out to 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. organisers all around the world. In order to share this content and news with more people, we will be posting the newsletters to this blog as well!

Howdy WordPress meetup organizers!

Welcome to another meetup organizer newsletter full of news, information and inspiration. In this edition we’re looking at some upcoming activity in the WordPress project, as well as providing a dose of inspiration for organizers all over the world from one of our local communities.

Newsletter contents:

  • Upgrading 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.
  • WordPress 15th Anniversary
  • Featured Meetup Event Format
  • Quarterly Community Events Report

Help your community upgrade PHP for their websites

The next WordPress release (v4.9.6) is going to include a clear prompt to all users about upgrading the version of PHP on which their website runs. You can find out some of the technical information about this update in the core ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/41191. It will point users to the an information page here: https://wordpress.org/support/upgrade-php/.

Once this prompt is live, it’s likely that a lot of users will be asking questions about what it all means and many will need help with running the PHP upgrade. This is where you, as community organizers, can really support the members of your community be assisting them with the upgrade process.

A great way to do this, is to host a PHP Upgrade Help Desk event where you work with people in your community to find out what version of PHP they’re running and help them to upgrade if they are not running a secure version. There is now a ‘PHP Upgrade Help Desk’ event template on Meetup.com so you can easily set the event up with a few clicks. This is also a great opportunity to educate members of your community on website and server security, so maybe spend some time at the meetup talking about related security topics.

Celebrate the 15th Anniversary of WordPress

In our last newsletter, we spoke about the WordPress 15th Anniversary that is coming up on May 27 — read about our plans for this as a community here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2018/03/21/wordpress-15th-anniversary-parties/.

This date is fast approaching and we’d love to hear more about what you’re planning for your meetup group! We would also love to help you out with some unique swag for the event — check out our handbook page about the event for more info and swag order form: https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/meetup-organizer/event-formats/wordpress-15th-anniversary-celebrations/ — swag orders need to be made before April 23.

You can see what other communities are planning for their events, as well as download assets for printing swag locally, on the WP15 website here: https://wp15.wordpress.net/.

Remember to use the #wp15 hashtag so we can keep track of all the events, photos and updates about the celebration in one place!

Featured Meetup Event Format: Ahmedabad Double HeaderHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes.

From time to time we will feature interesting and notable meetup event ideas, formats and topics in this newsletter — you can use these ideas to bring some fresh inspiration for events in your community.

For this edition, we would like to highlight the Ahmedabad meetup group and the format they use to cater to all types of users. Their events feature two separate talks that focus on two entirely different areas of WordPress, each with their own unique focus. Then, to make sure that they enable social time as well, they schedule one talk for the start of the meetup and one talk to take place at the end, with general community time in the middle — that way, everyone gets to hang out together, as well as to take part in the session that most interests them.

You can see an example of this type of event format here: https://www.meetup.com/ahmedabad-wp-meetup/events/247111225/.

Please let us know by emailing support@wordcamp.org if you have suggestions for any interesting meetup event format ideas that you have seen or organized!

2018 Community Progress Report

It has been an exciting year so far with a lot of great events wrapped up already. With that in mind, we thought it would helpful to reflect on how the program has grown in the past three months:

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.:
From January through March, 41 meetup groups joined the chapter program, with 5,195 new members joining groups around the world. In something of a milestone achievement, the meetup program reached 600 groups around the world right at the end of March. We now have WordPress meetup groups in 91 countries, all over the world!

WordCamps:
From January through March, 45 WordCamps were approved for planning. 16 are first time WordCamps for their city — those new WordCamps are: Florianópolis, Verona, Karachi, Ogijima, Granada, Turku, Valencia, Saint-Petersburg, Cancún, Puebla, Montclair, Lausanne, Taiwan, Guadalajara, Iloilo and Nice.

Remember, if you think that at least 50 people in your group would be willing to attend an all-day event about WordPress, then you an organise a WordCamp — find out more here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/wordcamp-organizer/welcome/.

That’s it for now — chat to you next time!

Your friends on the Community Team
make.wordpress.org/community

Andrea Middleton 11:44 pm on March 21, 2018
Tags: wp15   

WordPress 15th Anniversary Parties

The WordPress 15th anniversary will be on May 27, 2018 — let’s get ready to celebrate!

Parties

We invite all local communities to organize 15th anniversary celebrations for the weekend of May 27, just as we did for the 10th anniversary. We’ll be emailing all 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 on Friday, March 23 with information about the anniversary and a link to the new anniversary celebrations handbook page.

In April, we’ll launch a WordPress 15th anniversary site which will help WordPress enthusiasts find their local celebrations in the weeks leading up to May 27. This site will also aggregate and display the social media posts that include the #wp15 hashtag in and around May. WordPress groups in the chapter program will be included in the map of WordPress celebrations, and of course celebrations will be listed in the events widgetWidget A 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. (as long as they’re added as an event on meetup.com).

Special swag

This year, we’ll also be sending special WordPress 15th anniversary swag — sticker sheets and (biodegradable) party balloons — printed with a 15th anniversary logo, to chapter meetup groups that are celebrating the anniversary on the weekend of May 26-27. Once you have scheduled an event for that weekend, you can request shipment of a swag pack by filling out the form on the handbook page.

The WordPress 15th Anniversary website will also have a page with special anniversary logo files and DIY party decoration ideas, which will be added as we get closer to the event. If you would like to contribute ideas or DIY decoration files to this page, please comment on this post!

Because international shipping isn’t always fast or reliable, we encourage groups in countries that have trouble receiving mail from the US to schedule their events as early as possible. We’ll be shipping swag in three rounds: April 6, April 13, and April 30. To avoid wasting money on shipping swag that doesn’t arrive in time, the deadline to request swag is April 27. Organizers must schedule their parties on a meetup.com chapter group before requesting anniversary swag.

Venue support

We encourage groups to organize their parties using free venues if at all possible. However, if a group needs help with venue rental costs for this particular event, organizers can fill out the meetup venue support request form —  the current guidelines will apply for this event as for other venue rental support requests (except we won’t ask to be billed for multiple months in one invoice 😉 ).

If you know you’ll need to request financial support for a 15th Anniversary venue, please apply as soon as possible — we may receive an unusual volume of requests in April. If any 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 willing to help work on venue support requests, please let us know so we can train you on reviewing and handling those applications. 🙂

Questions? Thoughts? Suggestions? Please comment below!

[Edited April 23 to extend swag request date to April 27]