Community events are an important part of the WordPress project. Due to COVID-19 concerns, many organizers have had to cancel or postpone their WordCamp or Meetup. At this time, the Community Team is working hard to help organizers host virtual events so that the community can continue to connect with and inspire each other.
In order to facilitate successful community events during this global emergency, we would like to quickly revisit and adapt some of our existing community guidelines. We propose the following changes for virtual community events during this time:
- Approve regional/country WordCamps, Meetups, do_action events. We strongly believe that there is much value in local, in person events, and intend to maintain this guideline when we can all meet in person again safely. During this time, however, we propose to more readily approve country/regional events as long as the major meetup groups are involved in the organizing process.
- Skip the budget review portion of the WordCamp planning process. As virtual WordCamps won’t cost organizers any money, we won’t need budget reviews! WordCamp Central will be providing Crowdcast accounts to WordCamps, and since virtual WordCamps will be offering free tickets, there is no income either. One outstanding question here is how we can involve sponsors, as there is no financial component.
- Allow for shorter planning periods for community events. A virtual event tends to be faster to organize. We would like organizers to propose the date of their event, allowing for enough time between orientation and the event to find speakers, volunteers, and market the event.
These are changes that we would like to implement in response to the global emergency only. We hope to go back to in person gatherings with original guidelines for planning community events as soon as we can, as our in-person program has proven to empower more community leaders across a large number of local communities, and to reach more people within those areas.
Please let us know your thoughts on this proposal by this Friday, March 27th. We know this is a short period of time, but in the interest of enabling the WordPress community to start organizing events again, we’d like to move this forward quickly.