 All right, folks. We're recording. I'm gonna share my screen. Please let me know if you can sit with thumbs up or you also feel free to unmute yourself and speak if you prefer. All right, nice. I got a thumbs up. Thanks. All right, so everyone, welcome today to this session format is about contributing to the WordPress community team. We will focus on events and roles for today. I am Isotta. I am based in Barcelona, Spain, and I'm a full-time contributor for the community team. If you have any questions, there will be time at the end for a Q&A moment, but please also feel free to just unmute yourself or write a question in the chat space. And I am not able right now while presenting to see the chat, but maybe Naoko or yourself directly, you can unmute yourself and ask a question. But this presentation will last about 30 minutes maximum. And there will be time also at the end for discussing, sharing feedback, and answering any question you might have. Thanks. All right, so what we will be talking about today. As mentioned, this session is gonna focus mostly on events, WordPress events, and the community team roles and responsibility. We're gonna start with a quick overview about different ways you can contribute to the community team. Then we'll dive into the types of WordPress events, what you can expect WordPress events, what usually happens at our events. Then we will share a few resources about the events, and then we will focus on the community team roles and responsibilities. We wanted to focus a little bit more about these roles because there's been changes. In the past month, and also we've seen that it seems quite easy for everyone to start contributing to the community team by organizing events, but there's still a lot of confusions about the other community roles, and the other ways that you can contribute and support other communities as well. So the main ways we can contribute to the community team is by organizing events or becoming an event or a program supporter. Organized event, it can be a meetup, it can be a work-up, a do-actions, or a new type of events that we will see in details in a few moments, or you can also decide to become an event or program supporter. These are roles that we talk a lot about those roles in this presentation. These are roles created to support organizers all around the world. A little bit of an overview about the organizational structure of the community team. We will come back on this later, but so you can all have an overview of it. We're all community members. Let's say that we participate to the community, to the WordPress community, we organize events, we attend WordPress events, and we are already part of the community. Then there are two ways, as we have just seen, become an organizer of an event by applying for event organization or becoming an event or program supporter. There is another path, another application, and a different process, but these are all ways that we can support and uphold each other. Let's start from event organizing. To contributing as an event organizer is quite simple and straightforward. Anyone who is willing to follow the five good faith rules, which are the five rules that our community is based on, I believe this could be familiar for you all. If not, don't worry, we can share resources in the chat at the end of the presentation. So if you're willing to follow the five good faith rules, you want to respect our community code of conduct and embrace the principle of open source. And of course, you say that you organize an event and then you show up, you can organize the WordPress event. It's very, very simple and open. The more we are, the better it is. So about the five good faith rules, which again, you will get the link to this. So if you want to come back later, you can do it. Basically, these rules are the pillars of our community. I'm gonna read through them. So the first rule says that WordPress meetups, and we can also extend it to any of our events are for the benefit of the WordPress community as a whole, not specific businesses or individuals. The second rule says that we need to be open to all who wish to join, regardless of ability, skill, financial status, or any other criteria. Events are all volunteer run with volunteer speakers. So the same that you as an organizer, you're doing it as a volunteer, non-speakers or other collaborators should expect to be paid for participating. Fourth rule says that communities allow events to be organized by any reliable trusted members. And the last one says that we need to work to foster an accepting environment, which is free of discrimination and settlement of violence, promotion of hate, and general jerk-like behavior. Summarizing these rules, we want for everyone who wants to join the community to feel that they belong, don't feel any type of discrimination, and they feel that the final goal would always be the benefit of the whole community. So we don't want to push for a specific business to get visibility or to raise the visibility of individuals. We are there, all of us were there for each other. And we need to work for maintaining or making the spaces free of any discriminations. And regarding the fourth rules, this is very important when it comes to building an organizing team or having more people joining you as organizer. Everyone who does that to organize an event can organize it. Of course, if these are people reliable, trusted members of your community, even if they don't have an experience organizing event, but they want to help organizing, please let the mean teach them how to organize events because they're more the merrier. And this also allows us to bring in more diversity in terms of people, in terms of ideas. And so these effects would also have a benefit for your whole community. Okay, we said who can organize WordPress events, but we haven't said yet what are these WordPress events then. So WordPress events are any situation where people of WordPress gather, connect, learn from each other, and also contribute to the WordPress project. There might be, there are different formats for gathering. And we will see each one of these right now. Starting from Meetups. Meetups are local groups that get together on a regular basis. It can be once per month, other some meetups gather every two or three months. It depends a little bit on the needs of the community, but meetup groups are all over the world. Right now, there are over 700 meetups in more than 100 countries. What do we mean by meetups? How we can have a meetups? Basically, if you are ready to people talking about WordPress things, it can already be considered a meetup. All meetups are free to join and of course to attend. And during your meetup, you can offer different types of activities. Some of the most common are presentations or lectures. There can be co-working sessions, also workshop or contribution events, also social gatherings are very important for putting back the community together. Even more now that we're coming back from a pandemic, social gatherings are very loved and wanted by the community so folks can have a moment to regroup, get to know each other on a personal level and then start organizing and planning the whole year. At the end of the day, if you have different ideas, even better, please feel free to organize different types of meetup and also please share with the community team, what did you do, how was the outcomes because there are basically no limits to what a meetup can be. As the important thing is to keep respecting the community, the community values. How you can get involved in a meetup. First thing, attend a meetup event. You find the community on meetup.com, WordPress meetups are, as I said, all over the world. You will find also the next, the upcoming events of your work in your WordPress dashboard. So you can just sign up and attend the local meetup. You can volunteer to speak or organize and lead an activity at a meetup. You can join the organizing team and help them organizing the events. And if there is no local meetup in your city, you can apply to start one. Let's jump to work camps. Work camps are another type of WordPress events. We're talking about slightly different events. They tend to be more conference style, longer events, usually with a little bit more, usually work camps are bigger than meetups and historically they have happened once a year in a great city. A little bit of an overview. The first work camp was held in 2006 in San Francisco. And since then, the community have organized more than 1,100 work camps worldwide. Like same thing that we saw for meetups, also work camps can have different types and formats. The main categories are local work camps and flagship and regional work camps. Local work camps are city-based, organized by the local community and they target the local community. Flagship and regional events are bigger events, usually organized by communities from different or different countries or different regions within the same country. An event of local work camps could be work camp Paris example and an example of a flagship event, work camp Europe. An event, an example of a regional work camp could be work camp Denmark for example. Typical schedule of a traditional work camps, work camps as they are one or two days event, in some cases three. They usually have a registration in the morning, opening remarks, then there is the morning sessions with talks or workshops or activity, a break for lunch. Depending on the country, lunch break could be at 12, at 2 p.m. It depends on the local culture. Then you would almost always have an afternoon sessions then a closed remark and an after party. After party, we call it is way, but it can be also like a social gathering and formal gathering to keep spending time together without having any talks or activity to attend. Different types of session that you can find at work camps, you have presentations, panels around tables, interviews, AMAs, workshop and networking events. What can you do at work camps? Work camps usually offer a sponsor area, so you can walk with the sponsors and learn about their products and connect with them. You can find help desks or happiness bar sections. You have social events and also something that is called a hallway truck, which is, and I found out the meaning of it later because I'm Italian, I had no idea what a hallway truck was and basically it is just connecting to other people, chatting in the hallways between one session and another. You can find very commonly in workplace community contributor events. They can happen during a work camp or as a standalone events. Contributor events are moments where we encourage support and work together on WordPress projects. Currently, there are 22 contributor teams within the WordPress ecosystem and you can choose any team that you'd love to contribute to and also very important, you can choose multiple teams. So if you're interested in community team, please come join us and if you also have other interests, please reach out to the other teams and they will be more than happy to have you join them. Another type of event that we see within our community is we call them youth events or kid camps. These are WordPress events, especially for young folks who are interested in learning about WordPress. Also in this case, we can find them as a part of a work camp or as a standalone event. We also do action events. Do action events are acatom focusing on using WordPress to give charitable organizations online present. What does it mean that if we have non-profit organization who have not online present or they don't have a website that allows them to reach more people and to keep performing their charitable activities, we gather and we help them by creating them a website. These are events organized by a member of the local WordPress community usually. And now one new introduction, something new, one of the news of this year are the next generation events. What do we mean by next generation of WordPress events? These are events that the community is currently encouraging organizer to try out because when we came back from the pandemic, we have seen that all our needs changed. The whole community needed something different that all these life received in some ways a switch. So we gather together with the whole community and we thought, okay, how can we reflect these new needs into our events? So this new generation of WordPress events is born from the need of reactivating the community and bringing the community back together in a way that can spark innovation, can support the new needs. We also want to reach new and different audience and keep growing as a healthy, sustainable community. Along with the new event formats, we also discovered a new, let's say revisited purpose of our events, WordPress events, spark innovation and adoption by way of accessible training and networking for users, builders, designers and extenders. We celebrate community by accelerating 21st century skills, professional opportunities and partnerships for WordPressers of today and tomorrow. Many of us during these last years, we changed careers, we felt the need, I wanted to learn something new to overcome our limits and to keep connecting more and more on a global level while coming back to the personal connection, in-person connection on a local level. So this is why we, as a community team, we launched this project this year and we're currently supporting organizers who are planning and organizing pilot events in 2023. We saw a while, a few minutes ago, the traditional formats for work comes. Let's now see a little bit about what the next generation events can be because the limit is the sky. So these are a few ideas that we have gathered by lecturing feedback, receiving feedback from the community. So we've received ideas regarding events for college campus-based groups, so organizing events, targeting a specific group of students, self-learning clubs, events for identity-based groups, other events that focusing on a sort of sharp tongue, so ideas pitching, something more focusing on the business world, how can I pitch my ideas to collaborator sponsors. We have received feedbacks about and ideas about WordPress LearnUp, Sponsor Networking Day to connect with sponsors on a deeper level and also job fairs. One last but not least type of event that you'll see in our community events to introduce you to the open-source workshop. So we spread knowledge and we want everyone to understand the open web and open source through training events. They can be online. If you want to organize an in-person event, please let us know. We will be more than happy to support you. And the goal of these events are to highlight the potential of open-source softwares in regions where there are less participation. To summarize what we have seen until now, different and easy way to get involved in the community is attending events, becoming a speaker or leading an activity, volunteer to help because all events need volunteers to then run all things smoothly during the event days. And then of course, you can become an event organizer. Let's jump now to the community roles and responsibility. We've seen that, okay, there are so many types of events. There are many, many, many organizers all around the world. There is a need of a group of people, a team behind the scene who can support organizers and help them to run their events in the most smooth and easiest way possible. The mission of events and program supporters is to serve our community, to serve the new events types and provide guidance and support to the rest of the organizers. This year we have introduced slightly different roles compared to the past and we have renamed some of those. So remember the organizational structure that we saw at the beginning. We have introduced this year the event supporters. Formally, we used to call them mentors and we only had in the past work camp mentors. Now we want to offer also support to meetups group and so under the umbrella of event supporters, we will be providing support to all events types and all type of organizers. Program supporters, formerly called deputies and then we have program manager, formerly super deputies. Let's see now each roles who, like the requirements to join as in a specific role and our responsibility. Let's start with event supporters. The goal of event supporters is to make events easier to organize and improve attendee experience. How we do it, we check in with organizers and we provide guidance and support. We also work as a bridge between organizers and the community team. In this way, we hope to remove part of the task, the responsibility from organizers' shoulders and working as a point of contact. The requirements become an event supporters. Well, you need to love the WordPress and WordPress community. The desire to meet other people because you would support not only folks in your region but also folks in other countries. If of course you have a language in common, then we ask for effective communication skills, organizational skills, reliability because we as event supporters, we need to be able to communicate, find the best way to communicate with organizers and also help them keep on track with their planning. We also require to complete two training courses. Program supporters, formerly deputies, are those who respond to all requests from the community members on Slack, email. There are many folks spread out in different countries and every day we receive requests on different channels and our main goal is to respond to these requests. As a program supporters, we also vet applications. So we review all applications that arrive to the community for any type of events or any type of support that organizers applies. And we also interview applicants and help them moving forward with their event planning. Another of the tasks that we take care of is to handle swag shipment. So anytime that we need to, an event needs to receive pins, buttons, lanyard, et cetera, we handle all the shipments. What are the type of experience that we required for becoming a program supporters? I have to have been part of an organizing team for a workup or meetup. Some familiarity with the WordPress community, of course. Search skills, these are gonna be very useful for application review. Effective communication skills, friendly and welcoming attitude. So we would love to have only nice people in this role because we have to support folks who need help or they're having a problem. So we want to be friendly and welcoming as much as possible with everyone. And there are also in this case, trainings that we required to complete. Then the last role that we will be seeing today is the program manager, formerly called Super Deputies. These people performing in these roles are former program supporters who can now perform budget reviews for events. They create event sites, the moderate crisis, organized training and also negotiate global sponsorship agreements. Program managers are veteran program supporters with global experience, historical knowledge and most importantly long, not most importantly, but very important, long-term commitment to the community. The community, every year, vote for its community team representative. This year, Kate, Junco and Leo are our team reps. We host early, early elections. They lead the community meetings. They define the community goals and organize community activities at flagship event contributor days. There is another sub-team within the community team. We call it IRT, incident response team. The team formed by people who are trained to handle incidents. The responsibility of the incident response team is not to actively search or monitor behavior within the community or at events, but to be a resource to the community when things don't go as expected. There are ways to reach out to the incident response team and once the incident response team received an incident report, they will start investigation to help the community where the incident occurred. Okay, so now it's time to get involved with the community team. Probably even more, like even easier than starting organizing or proactively applying. The easiest thing is to join the community meetings and our conversation on Slack and the Make Community blog. Our team meetings are held the first Thursday of every month at 12 UTC and 9 p.m. UTC on Slack in the community team channel. And as I mentioned, you can also apply to become an event or a program supporter. One role doesn't exclude the other. Here are a few links that you might find useful from our handbook, the blog. We have handbooks for organizers, for program and event supporters, and a few other resources that you might find useful. I can share all of those in the chat in a second. All right, I thank you all for joining us today. I'm gonna stop sharing and let's see if anybody has some questions. Feel free to unmute yourself if you want to ask anything. Oh, and welcome to all those who have joined us during the presentation. Much more people now. Meanwhile, I'm gonna check the chat to see if I've missed some questions. Thank you so much now for sharing all the links. Yes, yes, please unmute yourself and also, can you, hi, thanks. Hello, thank you. How do you do? I'm doing great, thanks. How are you doing? Yes, thanks for the asking. I am good too. I have one question. Which you have said this URLs for the, join the community team, right? Eh, yes. Yes, okay. Yes, I'm sorry. Are you asking if to share the link? No, my question is if I am, I will join the community team. So, you have said the link in chat, right? How to join in community teams? Yes, yes, depending on the role that you're interested in. Yes. There are different links. Which type of role you were looking for? I got it. I got it, your point. Ah, okay. Thanks for the sharing. Thank you. You can find already the links shared in the chat. I can re-share them now at the end. So, you can grab the link that you prefer. But if you scroll, if you scroll the chat, you'll find sent from Naoko Takano. She has shared there. Thank you. Okay. Does anyone else have questions to ask or comments? Okay, see that there was a question regarding, okay, regarding application. I'm gonna read it for everyone. So, in case it can be useful for others. We received a question from Hans. I would like to organize WordPress Meetup here in Atherdon, Germany. And yesterday I filled out the form on the Workam Central, the website. And send it off. We can use the location here for free. If possible, can you tell me where I can expect an answer? Thanks a lot, Hans, for asking this question and also for once you organize a WordPress Meetup in your city. We usually, we try to always give a replies within one or two weeks, depending on the moment of the year. We can be a little slower, usually when there are some big events and so all program supporters or most of them are busy with supporting events like for example, Workamp US happening at the end of this month. If you don't hear anything back from us before the next 10, 14 days, please feel free to ping us on Slack and we will reply to your pings. And I don't think there are any other questions. Hans, thank you. Thank you for joining us. If there are no more questions or doubts, we can end this session. I will upload the recording on WordPress TV and let you know once the recording is available. And also, oh, hey, Davin. Yes, please unmute yourself and ask a question or share with somebody. Sorry, hi everyone, I'm Davin. I'm actually listening to Iso Tau's presentation and keep going, moving back and forth and Slack and the presentation. I would just like to use this opportunity to also, because I'm aware that we have 15 minutes. Because I know there's Hans and Birgit and I know both of you have talked to Harmony about the Next Gen event. So this is the recent project that we're all excited about. So Iso Tau, I'm not trying to hijack the session, but if anybody wants to ask any question about the Next Gen event, Iso Tau, me and now here are happy to respond. Oh, we have three minutes? No, 15 minutes? Yeah, no, actually session in three minutes, but don't worry if anybody has any question regarding Next Gen, we can certainly stay five more minutes to answer all questions you have. Okay, no worries then, five minutes will do. So Hans and Birgit, and Iso Tau, there's Junko here. If you have any questions specifically because Junko has a pipe. So Junko is the lead organizer for Next Gen event in Japan. It's going to be an online event focusing on training the community. And I think Hans and Birgit, I know you have met with Harmony during the discovery call, talking about what you all wanted to do in reactivating the community in Germany. And I think if I'm not mistaken, your IDs is specifically about finding an innovative approach to connect need-up organizers and webcam organizers in Germany. So I'm just going to add two things that we wanna see from Next Gen events moving forward. First, we really wanna see an event that we've never seen happening in the WordPress ecosystem. If you can come up with a great innovative creative ID that we can support, that is doable, replicable, scalable, let us know. Particularly events that we've never seen happening in our WordPress ecosystem because we know our meetup organizers, webcam organizers, they know how to organize conferences, training, then workshop. So if you can come up with something exciting that is different from conferences and training and workshop, that will be great. And the second thing that we wanna really see in the Next Gen event is how we can bring new audiences, new attendees to our events because WordPress needs to get bigger and stronger and we need fresh innovative minds to actually make WordPress bigger and stronger. So yeah, that's basically the two things that we are looking from Next Gen events. That's it. Any questions, Bridget? We are going, yeah, let me read your messages. I feel you Rico. And yeah, well, if you have any, any, anything, so you know how we do contributor day. If you find a different format on how our community can contribute, but more exciting than just lecturing on a table like in the same table, then yeah, let us know. It might be called something else. It doesn't have to be called contributor day, but basically allowing folks to experience how to contribute to WordPress.org project. And it doesn't have to be coding, programming, anything that you feel like, oh, this is something that my community needs and I can contribute to help that happen. Yeah, what can Germany is happening soon as well in October 19 to, was that 19 to 12? Okay, probably I got it wrong. 20 versus, sorry, not 12. Okay, 20 versus, yes. And you've had a new event and you've had a new format to go with. I've never seen something that that good. And Rico, if you have time to check out our meetup organizer handbook, we do actually have a page that lists down the kind of format we can do for our meetup events. I agree that folks tend to fall into organizing the same kind of lecture format while you can actually organize something different. Brownback discussion, even just a call working or networking or thank you now, or, well, I'm gonna say the Japanese community have done a photo walk two times. In fact, especially in Tokyo, where you bring the community members, your meetup members out, go out, take the mobile phone and SLR camera probably and take pictures and then upload it to the WordPress photo directory. So that is fun. You don't need a venue, basically. You might need something like to refresh your mind after a long walk, but that would be nice as well to have an outdoor sort of activity. And then people get a batch of photo contributor batch by uploading just one photo. So that's excited. Several times, already several times. Oh my God, Jakarta trying to catch up, but it hasn't happened. And it's already several times in Tokyo. Yeah, Moses, I asked if the team could come up with a standard template for a concept proposal for the next generation WordPress event. We are preparing that. We're gonna have a dedicated application, but at the moment, before the discovery call, we already send a list of information that we want to hear from you so that I'm sorry this didn't happen with you, Birgit and Hans and Junco, but moving forward, before the discovery call, we wanna have a list of information that you can prepare. And then when we have the discovery call, we can really focus on helping you shape your idea. So yeah, so Moses, I'm sorry, I forgot to mention in Masaka, we also going to have an event, next-gen event, and it's focusing on students showcasing the project. So it's targeting student, but it's about project showcase. So yeah, that's also something new. Yay. All right, Izota, I think this is more than five minutes, sorry, that's my hijack your session. No, no, no, that's why it's more than welcome and really relevant. So thanks for jumping in. Thank you everyone for joining this session. As we mentioned, you can always find the community team on Slack, if you come up with a new question or feedback or something that you want to share, feel free to drop a message in the community event channel. And we can keep the conversation going in there and so other folks can also jump in and participate. It was lovely to see you all. I wish you a great week. Thank you, Izota and everyone. Thank you. Thank you, bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.