Tag Archives: meetup

Courtney P.K. 11:03 pm on February 4, 2020
Tags: meetup,   

2019 Annual WordPress Meetup Member Survey

A similar message to this post was sent to all WordPress Chapter 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. members via meetup.com, but we are also sharing below.

If you are a Meetup Organizer, please feel free to share the survey link via discussion boards, email, social media, or even announce at an in-person event!

Hello WordPress meetup members!

As 2019 has come to a close, we would like to get your feedback on 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.. Even if you did not attend meetup events this past year, your opinion would be valuable! The survey takes less than 3 minutes to fill out, and the results will be shared by the global community teamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps. to help all WordPress meetups improve.  Don’t delay! The survey closes on 28 February 2020.

https://wordpressdotorg.survey.fm/2019-annual-meetup-program-survey

This survey contains general questions relevant to the global WordPress Meetup program. Your local meetup organizers may decide to send you another one later, with more focused questions about your local community.

WordPress Global Community Sponsors for 2019

A big thank you to our 2019 global sponsors! Their generous support keeps the meetup program free for the whole community and helps to make sure ticket prices for WordCamps stay affordable.

  • Jetpack *
  • WooCommerce *
  • Bluehost *
  • Liquid Web
  • GoDaddy *
  • HubSpot *
  • GreenGeeks
  • DreamHost

* These sponsors support WordPress events worldwide.

Become an Event Organizer

WordPress is an 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. project, open to anyone who wants to join. That is true for event organizers, too! Many groups still have one event per month, often a presentation or lecture followed by Q&A or a social hour. These regular events are great, but it means that people who cannot make that time each month are left out, as are people who are interested in different topics. 

All meetups on the WordPress chapter account allow any trusted, reliable member of the group to organize an event, so if you’ve been wishing for a particular kind of WordPress event in your town, this is a great time to become a WordPress organizer. 

There are some ideas for event formats to inspire you, on the Events Formats page in the Meetup Organizer handbook.

The possibilities are endless, and as long as it relates to WordPress, you can organize within your meetup group! Start a conversation on your group’s discussion board or contact the local organizing team with your ideas!

Contribute to the WordPress Project

One of the things we have heard from people is a desire for their meetup group to be more connected to the overall WordPress open source project. If you don’t stop by the community team’s blog often, please subscribe to email updates! There may be a few new projects you might be interested in.

Here’s to a great 2020, and as always, thanks for using WordPress!

–The WordPress Global Community Team

#meetup, #survey

Aditya Kane 2:00 pm on August 22, 2019
Tags: meetup, , ,   

WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: August 2019

Hello 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:

  • Diverse Speaker Training Workshops
  • Organizer Best Practices: How to address panic
  • New event format from the Perth WordPress Meetup
  • Reminders

Diverse Speaker Training Workshops

As organizers, have you ever had challenges getting women and people from other underrepresented groups 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 (#wpdiversity): https://make.wordpress.org/training/speaker-training

Check out their new Intro video (2 min) that explains what this workshop is all about!

This is now up on their page, along with:

  • A new description
  • Updated results
  • The new four step process for meetups to take to run the workshop

Check it out here: http://tiny.cc/wpdiversity

Upcoming training timings:
– Sept 4 at 11am-1pm UTC

Sign up at http://tiny.cc/wpdiversity

Organizer Best Practices: How to address panic

As an organizer of community events, you might run into situations when you need to address panic. This post on the WordPress Community blog, looks at important ways to recognize stressed behaviours and 4 steps to address panic.

There are also listed ways to get in touch with the WordPress Global Community TeamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps., who are very likely to have through their combined experience, would be able to help you in the best ways possible.

This is part of the on-going Organizer Best Practices series of discussions on the WordPress Community team blog.

New event format from Perth WordPress Meetup

The Perth (Western Australia) meetup decided to change up the format of their regular meetup, and they have had some great feedback about it.

Based on the feedback they received, they found members who were developers found some talks not technical enough, and for members who were users they were sometimes too technical.

So for every topic they organizer a meetup around they added a second talk. Their format now is

– Technical Talk
– Networking
– User Talk
– Q & A with ‘the panel’

This is also a great example of using feedback from attendees to iterate on meetup formats.

Reminders

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

Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community

#newsletter #meetup

#meetup-organizer-newsletter

Aditya Kane 9:50 am on July 8, 2019
Tags: meetup,   

It’s time to start preparing…

It’s time to start preparing the the July 2019 edition of 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. organizers newsletter.

If there are any topics you’d recommend we include, or any interesting meetup event formats you think are worth highlighting, please comment/leave your ideas/suggestions in the comments on this post.

We’ll gather comments here for one week until the 17th of July 2019 19th of July 2019.

The newsletter typically spotlights:

  • an interesting event format that organizers might want to try out
  • news about global community teamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps. projects
  • news about the WordPress 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. project

Thanks!

#newsletter #meetup

Aditya Kane 5:30 pm on May 22, 2019
Tags: , meetup, ,   

WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: May 2019

Hello 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:

  • Organizer Best Practices: Make the most of your feedback!
  • Call for Organizers: Introduction to 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. Workshops for 2019
  • Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops
  • Reminders

Organizer best practices: Make the most of your feedback

On the Make Community blog, there is a discussion that has been kickstarted about some best practices as organizers, around collecting and acting on feedback that we receive.

The discussion includes answering the following questions

  • Where does feedback come from?
  • How to get better feedback?
  • What to do with feedback once you have it?

You can read the entire blog post here.

This is part of the on-going Organizer Best Practices series of discussions on the WordPress Community team blog.

Call for Organizers: Introduction to Open Source Workshops for 2019

Last year, in an effort to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software (OSS), the WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org. helped fund four “Introduction to Open Source” workshops in Ghana, India, Colombia and St. Lucia.

The goal of this workshop series is to highlight the potential of open source software in regions where there is less participation in OSS projects.

Last year’s workshops were quite successful, so in 2019 we’re expanding this program to support up to ten separate events.

If you want to organize the “Introduction to Open Source” workshop at your meetup, please read this announcement and fill in the form.

We’ll select and notify our first round of shortlisted groups by the 31st May 2019 and the second round of shortlisted groups by 31st August 2019.

The application form will be closed on 15th July 2019.

Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops

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

Write to us to sign up for this or find out about future training sessions here: http://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak

To sign up and get more details, either fill out our form and comment with which date you’d would like to attend a training email the working group at [email protected]

Reminders

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

Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community

#newsletter #meetup

#meetups, #meetup-organizer-newsletter

Aditya Kane 8:31 pm on April 22, 2019
Tags: meetup, , ,   

WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: April 2019

Hello 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:

  • Organizer best practices: helping your local meetup
  • Proposal for Central 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. Directory
  • Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops
  • Reminders

Organizer best practices: helping your local meetup

On the Make Community blog, there is a discussion that has been kickstarted about ways to help your local meetup and some best practices around them.

Here are 11 ways to contribute to your local WordPress meetup, which can also serve as a graceful path to community leadership:

  1. spread the word about the meetup (sharing photos on social media, word of mouth, flyers, blog posts, etc)
  2. greet & welcome new attendees
  3. take attendance (if your group keeps a record of who actually attended the event)
  4. deliver opening or closing remarks (easier if the points to cover are written down)
  5. facilitate a round-table discussion
  6. give a presentation
  7. help find a free venue
  8. record & post a presentation to WordPress.tv
  9. organize refreshments
  10. suggest or recruit speakers
  11. organize an event series

Proposal for Central Block Directory

With blocks becoming the new way to manage content in WordPress, more and more types of blocks are being developed to cater for different use cases and content types. In an effort to make it easier for content creators to find these block types, there is a proposal for a new type of pluginPlugin 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 and a directory to handle it.

The proposal outlines a new type of WordPress plugin that provides blocks and nothing else, named Single Block Plugins. The primary benefit would be to provide content creators with individual pieces of functionality and new types of blocks without the need to search for and install new plugins.

The Single Block Plugins would be hosted in a separate Block Directory section of the Plugin Directory and they would initially be JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/.-based. Each plugin will register a single block, and they will be searchable and installable from within the editor itself. This puts blocks at the publishers’ fingertips — you no longer have to leave the editor to find them.

Want to get involved in shaping this new type of plugin? Join in the conversation on the proposal post, follow the Meta team blog, and join the #meta channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops

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

Write to us to sign up for this or find out about future training sessions here: http://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeakTo sign up and get more details, either fill out our form and comment with which date you’d would like to attend a training email the working group at [email protected]

Reminders

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

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

#newsletter #meetup

#meetup-organizer-newsletter

Aditya Kane 2:53 pm on February 22, 2019
Tags: meetup, ,   

WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: February 2019

Hello 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:

  • Annual Meetup Surveys close on 28 Feb
  • Event Format: Ask me Anything on WordPress
  • Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops
  • Reminders

Annual Meetup Surveys close on 28 Feb

Last month we sent out our meetup member and organizer surveys.

Please help us improve our support of meetup organizers and member all over the world by taking 10 minutes to fill out the organizer survey! The survey will be up until the 28th of February 2019.

It would be helpful if organizers could also remind their members to respond to the surveys.

Event Format: Ask me Anything on WordPress

Some 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. are experimenting with new type of meetups format, where organizers and volunteers are hosting an open-office or help desk, where attendees can get to ask about their WordPress problems to experts.

Some examples are these meetups from communities in Karachi, Pakistan and Pune, India.

This is a great way for ensuring local WordPress users getting to meet and interact with local WordPress experts.

For more event formats that have worked well in other WordPress meetup groups, check out the meetup organizer handbook page on event formats!

To hear a round table discussion between other meetup organizers about popular topics at meetups, check out this video.

Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops

The diversity outreach speaker training working group is asking for feedback from organizers who have run the diversity speaker training. Send an email to [email protected] to get the feedback questionnaire!

For more info, to let us know that you are running a speaker training workshop, and if you want to request training to run the workshop, please check out our page: https://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak

This month’s featured speaker training case study: Kirsten in Vancouver, BC

Diverse public speaking changes lives and local communities. Kirsten took the speaker training workshop and spoke for the first time 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. Vancouver. While there, she was spotted by a local agency and was hired as their first female developer. Kirsten quickly became the senior developer and team lead and is still in this role three years later. Recently she hired another female developer at her company!

“It had never occurred to me before that I had anything worthwhile to offer the WordPress community. Through the workshop, I saw that I had been underestimating my experience and perspective, and I became comfortable and confident about speaking on a topic I felt would be of interest to others.” – Kirsten

Reminders

  • On the community team we have Office HoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time. four times a week in the #community-events channel on 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/.: Mondays & Wednesdays 22:00 UTC, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:00 UTC.
  • There is a proposal to improve this newsletter with additional organizer tips and training. You can leave your feedback on this link.

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

Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community

#meetup #newsletter

#meetup-organizer-newsletter

Jonathan Bossenger 1:23 pm on December 21, 2018
Tags: meetup   

WordPress meetup organizer newsletter: December 2018

Hello 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. This will be the last newsletter for the year 2018.

Newsletter contents:

  • The Annual Meetup Survey
  • Thanks to our Global Sponsors
  • Event Format: A Meetup 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.
  • Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops

The Annual Meetup Survey

If you have been involved with organizing meetups for a while, you will be familiar with the annual meetup surveys that we send out at the end of each year. These are surveys that we send out to all meetup organizers and members to find out how you feel the meetup program is going and provide feedback on what we can do to improve things.

This time around we’re changing the schedule slightly and will be sending those out in January 2019, so keep an eye on your inbox for those and share them with your meetup group – more responses is better for the program overall!

Thanks to our Global Sponsors

As many of you know, WordPress community programs benefit greatly from the generous financial support of a number of companies. WordPress Global Community Sponsors allow us to pay for meetup venues when necessary, help with accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) costs for WordCamps and meetups, and provide every single 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. in the world with a “nest egg” of sponsorship on the very first day of active planning.

We’d like to take a minute here to give our global sponsors a big thank you for their ongoing commitment to supporting WordPress global community programs!

Our gold sponsors for 2018 include Jetpack and WooCommerce worldwide, and Bluehost in the Americas. Silver level sponsors are GoDaddy worldwide, Bluehost in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and DreamHost in the Americas. Finally, BoldGrid was a bronze level sponsor in the Americas. Thank you to all of these companies for their dedication to global community events.

Event Format: A Meetup of Meetups

Planning for your 2019 meetup schedule and struggling to come up with ideas of find speakers? Angie Meeker might just have an idea that will help you – the Columbus tech community has quarterly “Meetup of Meetups”, where the various leaders of different meetups in get together to discuss what is upcoming at their meetups, what their needs are individually, and how they can best contribute to needs in the city. These meetups are held every quarter, with a year end ‘Meetup of Meetups” party.

This is a fantastic way to connect your local WordPress meetup group with other related communities in your area and it would be great to see a WordPress community lead the way in this sort of thing.

Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops

The meetups who have been running the diversity outreach speaker training workshop to get more women and other underrepresented groups to start speaking at their meetups and WordCamps have been having phenomenal results. Many of the WordCamps achieved 50% or more women speakers in less than a year.

Our last training of the year will be Sunday, December 16th, 2018 @ 17:00-19:00 UTC.

We will also be running trainings on the following dates:

* Thursday, January 10, 2019 @ 16:00-18:00 UTC
* January 27th, 2019 @ 17:00-19:00 UTC

Are you interested in learning more? Would you like to sign up for one of the trainings? https://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak

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

Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community

#meetup

Hugh Lashbrooke 2:37 pm on August 18, 2017
Tags: meetup   

Meetup.com email address sharing request

If you are an organizer of a 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. group that is part of the chapter account (i.e. your group is listed here and you are have the title of “Co-Organizer” in the group), then you would have received an email recently with the subject line “Action needed: Connect with WordPress”. The content of the email would have looked something like this:

This is a new feature that Meetup.com has launched, so it’s worth explaining exactly what it is and what it means for you as a meetup group member.

How things work at the moment is that the Global Community TeamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps., as administrators of the chapter account, do not have access to any email address of any organizers (or members) of the nearly 500 meetup groups. We are able to contact all organizers of a single group via the form on the group page itself (as all group organizers can), but that doesn’t reveal any of the contact information to us.

This new feature from Meetup.com aims to make chapter account management easier by displaying the email addresses of the group organizers to chapter account administrators. It is important to note, however, that this is entirely opt-in for each individual organizer. If you decide not to share your email address with the account administrators then it won’t be shared, but if you would like to share this information, all you need to do is click on the “Confirm” button in the email that you received.

The real question here is why this matters – why would you choose to share your email address?

As this feature is brand new to us as well, we haven’t fully thought through the implications yet, but at first glance there are a number of distinct advantages to having the email addresses for all meetup group organizers:

  • It would save a lot of time when sending out the annual meetup survey results.
  • We could use the email addresses to automatically add new meetup group organizers to the Making WordPress Slack group – this would reduce the friction when on-boarding new organizers.
  • We could finally look into a realistic way to automate the assigning of 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/ profile badges to meetup group organizers.
  • It would go a long way to helping us maintain reliable contact with all organizers.

I’m sure we’ll discover more benefits of this over time, but those are some initial thoughts about why this would be helpful for the meetup program. If you do decide to opt-in,  we will never share your email address with anyone and we will only use it for the purposes of improving the meetup program for everyone involved.

#meetup

Cami Kaos 7:41 pm on May 23, 2016
Tags: , meetup, ,   

Swag report 5/16/16- 5/22/16

Lanyard 100 packs sent: 7

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. OC: 4
WordCamp NEO: 3

Button & sticker 200 packs sent: 2

WordCamp OC: 1
WordCamp NEO: 1

Button & sticker 100 packs sent: 1

Hanoi 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.: 1

#community-management, #meetup, #swag, #wordcamp

Cami Kaos 10:42 pm on May 10, 2016
Tags: , meetup, ,   

Swag report 5/2/16 – 5/8/16

Lanyard 100 packs sent: 8

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. Kansas City: 3
WordCamp Bhopal: 5

Button & sticker 200 packs sent: 2

WordCamp Kansas City: 1
WordCamp Bhopal: 1

Button & sticker 100 packs sent: 1

Bhopal 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.: 1

#community-management, #meetup, #swag, #wordcamp