It has already been a week since WordCamp 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 2024 took place. We are now ready to review what has been achieved there regarding sustainability. During the event, we’ve seen many contributions/contributors, talks and had many inspiring chats. We have the feeling that sustainability has become a more relevant topic for the community in general.
This was our first WordCamp Europe with an official team table. The organizers provided us with two tables (!) based on the number of responses to the registration form. They were pretty crowded throughout the day. We worked with contributors mainly on two projects:
- the WP Sustainability Plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party
- the Sustainable Events Handbook.
The team reps were able to manage having the official badges as well.
WP Sustainability Plugin
The contributors worked on developing a feature overview to guide the next steps in defining the plugin’s requirements. One of the key points of discussion was trying to find a way to calculate the page size without calling 3rd-party services.
They also worked on expanding one of the points outlined in the feature overview: a handbook to educate on how to make websites more sustainable.
Anyone interested can check the documents and continue the work done by the contributors in the WCEU with suggestions that will help the project move forward.
Sustainable Events Handbook
With the handbook for making WordPress events more sustainable recently published, contributors were able to work on the following related points:
- Spreading the word. The Marketing team helped us to send an amplification request which will help us to make the whole community aware of the existence of the handbook. And, hopefully, to get more feedback.
- Collecting and giving feedback. The initial handbook’s GitHub issue was finally closed, and a new one was created to facilitate contributors leaving their comments and improvement suggestions.
Sustainability Team’s badges
The magic of in-person collaboration enabled us to finally reach the objective of having our own Team’s badges. We have now both Sustainability Contributor and Sustainability Team badges. Team Reps already have them in their profiles, but we are still figuring out how to assign them. When we achieve this, the badges will be assigned to contributors following the criteria the team had approved some time ago. We’ll keep you up-to-date through the team’s meetings.
In general, it has been a very productive and motivating WCEU Contributor Day for the Sustainability Team. Thank you very much to all the contributors joining.
Thank You to Contributors
A big thanks to all the contributors who were there or present on Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.. Here are the people who contributed:
Please leave a comment if we missed you, we will add you to the list!
WCEU talks and sessions
The word ‘sustainability’ has been present all along the event, even in the opening session. Joost de Valk and Juliette Reinders Folmer kickstarted the first day with a keynote about the sustainability of the community. They made us all reflect on the future of Open Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. and how funding and generational change are crucial for the continuity of technology as we understand it today. Two further sessions continued to develop the topic of the social and economic sustainability of WordPress.
Firstly, we had a case study on how this generational change is happening in Uganda’s WordPress Community. Abraham Waita explained how the integration of WordPress into high school curricula is engaging the younger generation and empowering them to build the future of the community.
Secondly, a WordCamp Connect session opened the discussion to “Democratising Opportunities”. Carole Olinger (@caroleo), Karim Marucchi (@pirazo), and Courtney Robertson (@courane01) exchanged views and experiences about contributing and funding and included in the conversation two very interesting and not-so-brought topics: the mental health of the contributors and the point of view of the companies that fund them.
In addition to the economic and social sustainability of WordPress, there was also space to address the environmental aspect. During the WordCamp Connect session on the first Conference Day, Nahuai Badiola (@nbadiola) and Simon Kraft (@krafit) led a conversation about how to set sustainable standards for WordPress. Many attendees discussed the possibilities and difficulties of reducing emissions from WordPress sites.
Last but not least, Bjarne Oldrup (@oldrup) explained in his session, on the second Conference Day, how it is possible to have a website creation business that is economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable. This is a talk full of practical and real examples and cases of how to manage a business with a total focus on sustainability.
While we wait for the recordings to be uploaded, you can view the sessions’ slides:
This is all in terms of scheduled content. We are very happy to say that the conversations extended beyond the sessions, including chats in hallways, meetings, informal gatherings, and breaks. We couldn’t capture all of it in one post, but that’s what makes in-person contributions special. We look forward to seeing you all again soon and hope to meet the contributors who couldn’t attend this time. In the meantime, we will see you all at the meetings.
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This post has been reviewed by: @littlebigthing and @yellowlime
