On March 3 the Community Team met on Slack to share wins and struggles, updates from contributors, and discuss team members’ latest highlights.
As usual, two sessions were held on the same day to enable participation across time zones.
Below is a synopsis of the two discussions.
Diversity and Inclusion
Challenges
- The WordPress community should strive for age diversity and inclusion for both older and younger people.
- Additionally, we must consider financial diversity. Cost is a significant barrier to WordCamp attendance.
- The pandemic has caused us to quickly backtrack around diversity and community engagement. It’s harder to find organizers, volunteers, and speakers at this time. This challenge adds an extra level of stress for teams, who may in turn overlook and deprioritize diversity efforts. As community contributors, we must continue working hard and remain committed to diversity and inclusion.
Suggestions
- Update the Community Inclusion Initiatives page
Consider updating the Community Inclusion Initiatives WordCamp Handbook page to include “commercial” diversity initiatives (such as the Yoast Diversity Fund, which aims to increase the diversity of speaker lineups at tech conferences; and Underrepresented in Tech, which highlights speakers from underrepresented groups). In so doing, clearly indicate which are Make Community Team initiatives and which are external diversity initiatives. For any external initiatives, Deputies could conduct light vetting to ensure that they align with our community programs and expectations. It would be beneficial to establish a clear process to add resources in the future.
This discussion concluded with the following proposal:
- Organize the Community Inclusion Initiatives page for greater clarity and to be more user friendly;
- Create a very light form to submit commercial diversity initiatives for inclusion on the page (link, point of contact, purpose of the initiative, description of how it’s operated). Only list free resources or things that people can apply to (like the Yoast Diversity Fund).
- Make #WPDiversity training mandatory for WordPress event organizers
There is significant opportunity to increase new and returning WordPress event organizers’ awareness of and engagement with #WPDiversity offerings (Allyship training, Diverse Speaker training, and Diverse Speaker Support Program). Some meeting participants suggested that diversity training should be mandatory for event organizers.
Participants raised the following considerations:
- When it was created in 2017, the #WPDiversity program’s original aim was to raise awareness and provide training to those who seek it. But the WordPress community has changed and matured in the five years since then, and there is value in providing diversity and inclusion training for event organizers who wouldn’t actively seek it.
- If the WordPress community decides to make #WPDiversity training mandatory for organizers, this will require logistical thinking to accommodate increased training frequency and audience-sizes.
- This could be done in partnership with the Learn team.
- There is great opportunity to harness the momentum of the community’s current diversity discussions. Start with what we can do now, and then work towards a full vision at a later stage: “Something now is better than perfect later.”
- During onboarding, Community Deputies read through sections of the community handbook and then take short tests. We could similarly integrate #WPDiversity into event organizer training, with high-level subject matter that directs organizers to additional resources to learn more.
- A quick starting point could be to add to this course: https://wordpress.org/contributor-training/course/wordcamp-organizer-training/
- Next steps: @JuliaRosia will share a proposal on this topic in the coming weeks and post it to the Make Community blog for feedback.
Proposal: Refurbishing Camera Kits
We all appreciate and support the idea, and here below are a few thoughts about it:
- Audiovisual professionals in the community could help us to understand what’s needed and which kit could best serve our scope.
- It would be useful to have a step-by-step tutorial on how to use the kit so organizers feel more comfortable.
- We could add the above-mentioned tutorial to the Deputy and Mentor training so they feel comfortable in assisting event organizers.
Global Sponsorship
- Many meetup organizers don’t know that they can reach out to global sponsors and ask for in-kind donations. We should find a way to better communicate this.
- Community members often have a hard time understanding the distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Having WordPress.com as a 2022 Global Sponsor could further add to this confusion.
This recap has been written thanks to @juliarosia
Thank you to all the attendees: @peiraisotta, @sippis, @no249a002, @unintended8, @kdrewien, @jillbinder, @juliarosia, @mysweetcate, @tacoverdo, @angelasjin
Want to participate in the next Community Team Meeting? Join us in the #community-team channel on Slack!