Community Team Event Updates– July 16, 2024

Here is the quarterly update on our ongoing efforts to support community growth, guided by the Big Picture Goals 2024. Our focus is on helping current contributors and attracting new participants to our events. To that end, this report includes the latest participation rates and event financial activity, highlighting our progress and identifying areas for continued improvement.

As of June 30, 2024

WordCamps & WordPress Events Stats

First-time Attendees (FTA)
41.58% (Target 45%)
(WordCamps and WordPress events, excluding Meetups and Flagship WordCamps)

Events with 50% FTAs
24% (Target 45%)
(Average first-time attendee rate in local WordCamps & WordPress Events this year)

Event Attendee Satisfaction Rate
82.81% (Target 80%)
(Percentage of “Extremely satisfied” or “Satisfied” in WordPress Events post-event survey.)

Number of WordCamps
66
From January 1st to June 30th.
(Active WordCamps and WordPress Events / WordCamps and WordPress Events that have been held or are scheduled to be held)

Number of other WordPress Events
+175.0% (11)

MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area.’s Stats

January 1, 2024 to June 30, 2024

Number of RSVPs
-3.9% (39,013 Growth compared to the same period last year) 

Number of meetup groups
+1.7% (761)

Number of Meetup members
+4.3% (537,597)

Community Team Contributors

As part of the Five for the Future promotion, we will disclose the number of members who contribute to the community team.
60
(The current number of Program Managers, Program Supporters and Event Supporters.)

Financial

Total Global Funds (FY2024)
$725,000

Current Expenses
$174,659

#community-team

Community Team update – March

Proposal: 2021 Global Community Sponsorship program
As our events program will look again this year very different than we normally would have, there’s also a need to redefine how our Global Community Sponsorship program will look as we can’t promise the usual benefits. A team of experienced global Community Sponsorship program contributors set up a proposal, and they propose offering one package only with completely new benefits, available on a quarterly basis.

2021 Financial Update for the WordPress Community
Harmony provided an update on our financial health after we gracefully weathered the storm that was 2020. In summary, WPCSWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016. began the 2021 year with just over US$1.3M on hand from which approximately US$465K is owed to the Global Sponsors for their future sponsorships. WPCS also has approximately US$305K in prepaid expenses to various vendors. Cautious spending of WPCS money will still be necessary for the foreseeable future.

Request for feedback: Review for the dedicated deputy communication channel
The private #community-deputies 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 was created in December, so it’s time for the first review as we agreed. If you are active deputy, please share your thoughts. The post is also an open invitation for all community members to ask questions about the channel, which could help us with the review. If the result of the review looks like there’s no justification for private working space for deputies, the channel will be shut off at the beginning of April. In case the experiment continues, we will do another public review in three months.

In-person events
Recently the Community Team published new guidelines on having safe in-person meetups again. After these guidelines were published, we’ve seen some meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. groups that have met the criteria returning to host in-person meetups and that have hosted those successfully. There have been also a few incidents where the community haven’t met the criteria but organiser(s) have announced in-person meetup. Deputies have reached out to these organisers, explained the situation and events have been cancelled. One meetup group was used to promote an in-person event hosted outside of our chapter program, but organised by the same individuals who were organisers in the chapter meetup group. Also some time ago, the team received an application to organise in-person 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. from the community that meet the criteria for organizing in-person meetups. That application was rejected, as the Community Team expects all WordCamps to take place online for time being.

#community-team, #make-wordpress-org-community

Community team update – 19-02-2021

As the new year starts, we at the Community Team try again to start posting regular updates here.

Announcement: Decision making checklist for in-person meetups now available
The team agreed on creating a checklist and allowing in-person meetups if a certain set of criteria are met. There are also helpful resources for meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organisers that do have questions around the topic.

Community Team 2021 Goals Summary
We managed to put our goals for this year together! There are a set of ongoing goals, to which everyone in the team can contribute easily in their everyday work. There’s also a bit bigger goals for each quarter that will need a bit more focused contributions working towards the goals.

Proposal: 2021 Global Community Sponsorship program
A team of experienced global Community Sponsorship program contributors set up a proposal on what our global sponsorships could look like during 2021, as the Community Team is continuing with virtual-only WordCamps for the time being. They propose offering one package only with completely new benefits, available on a quarterly basis.

Call for Volunteers: Creating a Learn WordPress Course on Open Source Leadership
Angela Jin is looking for volunteers to help them create a course about Open SourceOpen 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. Leadership on the new Learn WordPress platform. You can also help by giving feedback about planned topics.

2020 Incident Reports – Details and Results
In 2020, Community Team received a total of 2 incident reports. Cami Kaos posted a summary of those reports and actions taken.

Tuesday Trainings
With the lead of Cami Kaos, the Community Team has started new Tuesday Trainings post series that shares some tips for event organisers, deputies and tries to answer commonly asked questions. Few latest episodes have clarified the role of WordPress Foundation and WordPress Community SupportWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016. PBCWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016., tips on how to organize successful discussion groups and materials from the Diverse Speaker Training Working Group.

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Community team update – 07-08-2020

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones. As there has been a long gap (again :/) after latest update and lot’s have happened after that, I’ll just reference our latest meeting another most important news.

Deputy updates

As usual, Community Team members are busy doing their job. No blockers, but a lot for things to do. Even small contributions from existing deputies are much appreciated and we warmly welcome all new contributors interested in becoming deputy! Coronavirus situation has affected us a lot and caused extra work.

Ongoing discussions

Additional posts worth highlighting

Numbers

Change compared to previous Community team update from 07-11-2019 if applicable.

  • General
    • Active deputies: 28 (+25%)
    • Active 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. mentors: 51 (+16%)
    • HelpScout total conversations: 1 147 (last month)
  • Meetups
    • Meetups needing vetting: 6
    • Meetups in chapter program: 825 (+5,2%)
    • Members in meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. groups: 495 203 (+10,2%)
  • WordCamps
    • WordCamps needing vetting: 0
    • WordCamps in the schedule: 7

+make.wordpress.org/community

#community-team

Community team update – 07-11-2019

Sorry for the late posting, I have had issues with w.org proxy which has prevented me from pulling some numbers.

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones:

Deputy updates

As usual, Community Team members are busy doing their job. No blockers, but a lot for things to do. Even small contributions from existing deputies are much appreciated and we warmly welcome all new contributors interested in becoming deputy!

Ongoing discussions

Discussion: How do we improve how we collect feedback from Meetup groups?
Every year, we distribute a survey to members of official WordPress meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. groups to gather statistics about the program as well as individual groups, in order to help improve the program. Since we’ve started distributing the Meetup annual survey in 2014, we haven’t seen a very high response rate. We could do much more than improve the questions on the survey.

Update: Contributor Orientation Tool
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 2019 organising team presented new tool that we’ve been developing to help new contributors select the make team they wish to contribute to – Contributor Orientation Tool. The tool was built as a prototype. As WordCamp Europe 2020 organising team is back to work, we are continuing our work on Contributor Orientation Tool as well.

Proposal Update: Speaker Feedback Tool
We recently posted a proposal for a speaker feedback tool to be baked into WordCamp sites. The proposal included some ideas and mockups, with a call for feedback, suggestions and questions. Based on the feedback from that post, we have some more refined mockups to share. In addition to that, we are looking for input on the data storage method.

Additional posts worth highlighting

Numbers

+make.wordpress.org/community

#community-team

Community team update – 03-10-2019

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones. This post covers two last meetings:

Deputy updates

Again as usual Community Team members are busy with helping community organizers around the world. We had a little too long queue on MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. 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. applications. The team organized two vetting sprints to shorten the queue and it achieved an empty Meetup queue on the later one!

Ongoing discussions

Proposal: Changes to application workflow for better communication
There is a proposal about how to communicate better with Meetup and WordCamp applicants. Now their applications can be (unfortunately) without any response or message from the Community team few weeks. Proposal is to create a HelpScout ticket automatically for every application and use HS workflows to send automatic notifications.

Proposal: Detect dormant Meetup groups and check with them automatically
Our Meetup program is growing fast. We had 575 active meetup groups in February 2018 and the latest number is 778. Some of those Meetups groups might be inactive or dormant for one reason or another. Community Team would like to help organizers and members of those Meetup groups to go forward and have regular meetups again. Currently we don’t have a very good tools to detect dormant groups and approach those. Proposal suggests automatic check for when the last meet up was held and semiautomatic communication process if that has been over six months ago.

Additional posts worth highlighting

Numbers

+make.wordpress.org/community

#community-team

Community team update – 05-09-2019

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones. Agenda and 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/. logs from September 5: 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC.

Deputy updates

Community Team members are busy doing application vetting and helping organizers. Also few meditations about challenging situations in the team – more about those later. No blockers with Community Team work.

Ongoing discussions

New Deputy Handbook page outlining a deputy review procedure
A few months ago, the Global Community Team received a formal complaint about the behavior of a community team deputy. This was a dismaying first, and required a new response procedure. Andrea documented the procedure and there is discussion to improve it.

Incident Report: Deputy Asked to Step Away from Official Roles
Related to the previous discussion, the review board was formed to handle the complaint. After getting more information and multiple challenging discussions, the board asked the deputy in question to step away from any official roles in official WordPress events for a minimum of 12 months.

Incident Report: Misappropriation of WordCamp Funds
Community team received another incident report alleging that a local 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. organizer had been mishandling the funds. Response team investigated this with other local community team members concluded that the organizer had used approximately US$ 7,000 for their own purposes. The person has been asked to pay back the money. If they do not follow the repayment schedule, the theft will be reported to local legal authorities. As a further result, this organizer has been asked to permanently refrain from taking part in any official WordPress event as a speaker, sponsor, organizer, or volunteer, and, for a 12-month period, from attending any official WordPress events.

Discussion: How to handle conflict of interest situations
There is ongoing discussion about recognizing conflict of interest situations in Community Team and how to handle those.

Additional posts worth highlighting

Numbers

  • General
    • Active deputies: 27 (+/-0%)
    • Active WordCamp mentors: 42 (+2.4%)
    • HelpScout total conversations: 919 (-4%)
    • HelpScout messages received: 1 013 (-6%)
  • Meetups
    • Meetups needing vetting: 14 (-6.6%)
    • Meetups in chapter program: 777 (+/-0%)
    • Members in meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. groups: 426 980 (+1%)
    • New Meetups groups in the chapter: Sofia, Bulgaria
  • WordCamps

+make.wordpress.org/community

#community-team

Community team update – 15-08-2019

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones.

Agenda and 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/. logs from July 18: 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC.

Ongoing discussions

How to handle conflict of interest situations
Team has some assumed norms about conflict of interest situations, but not any suggestions or documentation how to handle those. There is ongoing discussion to identify possible conflict of interest situations and how we should work with those. After discussion there will be an proposal or post for further discussion.

Additional posts worth highlighting

Numbers

  • General
    • Active deputies: 27 (+8%)
    • Active 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. mentors: 41 (+5%)
    • HelpScout total conversations: 990 (-19%)
    • HelpScout messages received: 1 051 (-28%)
  • Meetups
    • Meetups needing vetting: 15 (+/-0%)
    • Meetups in chapter program: 777 (+1%)
    • Members in meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. groups: 422 444 (+1%)
    • New Meetups groups in chapter: Gulfport, MS
  • WordCamps
    • WordCamps needing vetting: 8 (+11%)
    • WordCamps in the schedule: 63 (-6%)
    • WordCamp tickets sold: 2 422 (+43%)
    • New scheduled WordCamps: Port Macquarie 2019 and Stuttgart 2019

+make.wordpress.org/community

#community-team

Community Team update – 01-08-2019

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones.

Agenda and 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/. logs from August 1: 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC.

Deputy updates

As usual, Community Team members are busy doing MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. 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. application vetting, having organiser orientations, mentoring, organising events, replying to Help Scout tickets and helping organisers in general. Team and it’s members have no blockers with their work.

Ongoing discussions

Discussion: what to do in case of irreconcilable differences
We require embracing the WordPress licensing from all meetup organizers because they do represent WordPress. Community Team deputies encountered a situation for the first time in the chapter program history, where one chapter meetup organizer is distributing WordPress derivative that is not 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.. While deputies are trying to solve the situation by talking and education, Andrea started a discussion about what Community Team should do if the difference is irreconcilable. After discussion, we agreed that in that situation we remove the person from their role as meetup organizer of the group and email all members of the group, inviting a new organizer to step forward.

Proposal: clearer WordCamp and WordPress chapter meetup logo guidelines
We really have not had solid guidelines for meetup and WordCamp organizers how they can use the WordPress logo as a part of their own. Mel Choyce, Kjell Reigstad, Sarah Semark, Mark Uraine, and Tammie Lister made a proposal on what the guideline could look. There are good examples and suggestions listed on the post. The post is open for discussion before we merge the guidelines to the handbook.

Additional posts worth highlighting

Numbers

+make.wordpress.org/community

#community-team

Community Team update – 18-07-2019

The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones.

Agenda and 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/. logs from July 18 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC.

Deputy updates

As usual, Community Team members are busy doing MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. 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. application vetting, having organiser orientations, mentoring, organising events, replying to Help Scout tickets and helping organisers in general. Team and it’s members have no blockers with their work,

Ongoing discussions

WordCamp PWA Retrospective
Leading up to WordCamp Europe, the organising team enchanted the 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/ to be progressive web applicationProgressive Web Application A standard website that's been enhanced with features to make it faster and feel more like a native mobile application. Learn more. (PWA). The PWA was deployedDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. right before WordCamp Europe 2019 and was tweaked during the event. Key feature of this version was offline mode and custom “Day of event” frontpage that showed real-time schedule to visitors. We are now gathering feedback how PWA development process went.

Proposal: QR code for WordCamp badges
@casiepa has put together proposal on adding QR codes to WordCamp badges. Proposal is to send QR code to attendee after buying the ticket. That would make checking the attendee as arrived whole lot easier, allow easy on-site badge printing, t-shirt size check and possibly printing the code to badge for sponsors to scan. Discussion about this proposal is ongoing in the post comments.

Announcement: guidelines for using Trello
Community Team started a test phase for using TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. to organise its “big picture” work as a tool for general project management. The test phase will continue to the end of 2019 and team will evaluate pros and cons at the end of the year.

Call for volunteers: Handbook Working Group
Community Team started efforts to audit, rework and move content from P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. to our handbooks. @francinca has posted about forming working group and invitation to volunteer in it is open.

Numbers

For a long time, Community Team didn’t provide numbers from its work. This update is to change it.

Numbers below are for two weeks before the Community Team meeting on 18-07-2019, as team meetings are bi-weekly and that sets the reporting interim to two weeks. In next update, our numbers will also indicate the change.

#community, #community-team +make.wordpress.org/community