 Alright folks, I'm going to get us started because I am not super confident that I'm going to be able to tell you every single thing I want to tell you and still take questions. So welcome, thank you for being here. My name is Andrea Middleton. I'll be talking to you today about the development of WordPress community programs, both how they got started, how they've evolved, and then bonus round the challenges we still face. My hope is that if you're involved in a volunteer-organized events program or interested in starting one that you'll come away from this talk with a better understanding of how we do things in WordPress, both what has worked well and what hasn't worked well for us. Like I said, I'm going to be running through about seven years of the last of my professional career, so it's happily quite actually a lot of stuff, sometimes when you're doing community stuff it feels like you're kind of on a treadmill and working on this talk has been gratifying to see just like how far we've come in that period of time. I'm going to describe the changes roughly according to date, but I'm going to section that out into the WordCamp program since we got started with the WordCamp program first. Then I'm going to take us back in time and restart with the Meetup program and then we're going to bring it all together with the stuff that we're still struggling with on both sides, WordCamps and Meetups. Since the WordCamp program was born first, we're going to get that started. This was the first community-centered program we had. WordCamps, just to give you a basic definition, are casual locally-organized conferences centered on WordPress that are entirely staffed from organizers to speakers to day of workers by volunteers. They also have very cheap tickets. We have a ticket price cap of $20 per person per day and that's international. We have a special exchange rate that we use called the Big Mac Index. If you're interested in that, let me know to translate that from a cost of living perspective overseas. The first WordCamp was envisioned as a bar camp about WordPress, hence the name. Matt Mullenweg, who's a co-founder of WordPress and was the first WordCamp organizer, was also one of the original group of people who organized the first bar camp back in 2005. He organized his first WordCamp in 2006. This is a picture from that event. You'll see little baby Matt Mullenweg there on the stage talking to a lot of people who are just super stoked to get in a room and talk WordPress all day. The event kind of grew in popularity from there. As you can see, by 2010, we had 72 WordCamps that we knew of around the world. When I say we and no, I'm being very unspecific because there was actually no program support of WordCamps at this point. There was no oversight and due to that lack of oversight and lack of support, there were quite a few challenges that our organizers faced. Some examples. We had organizers audited by the IRS for running a lot of revenue that was unrelated to their personal business and or their personal lives through their accounts. We had PayPal accounts getting frozen because of ridiculous amounts of ticket revenue running through an account that previously had maybe received $100 a year. We had one time or in the case of one event, organizers were brought up on charges for not meeting the legal requirements related to accessibility standards in the U.S. So actually we're served with papers from the Attorney General. That was unpleasant. In another case, an event popped up, got a lot of sponsors and then disappeared and somebody ran off with that money. As you can see, we had issues both from the perspective of what made people think WordPress was all about, in the case of that very negative example at the end, malfeasance. Then also we had problems with the amount of risk that our community organizers were taking on and we didn't want anyone who was organizing an event for the WordPress open source project to have personal ramifications, at least not from a tax or legal perspective, certainly. One of the first initiatives we had, and this came out in 2010, was to define the expectation for WordCamp, both for what a WordCamp was and then also who could organize one. Also not only organize but to speak and sponsor, speak at or sponsor one. We rolled out our first set of guidelines in 2010 with a blog post because that's WordPress. I should pause here and say, a lot of the programs that I'm going to be talking about from here on out were the brainchild and the vision of a woman who at the time was named Jane Wells, currently known as Jen Milo. She's no longer with the WordPress community and I worked very closely with her and executed her vision but to not participate in erasure. I want to make it very clear that a lot of the structure we have today is due to her vision and her leadership. This paragraph, which you can't read, describes the basic expectation that anyone officially connected to a WordCamp, both embrace the GPL and also respect the trademark. That was one of the first guidelines we had for the WordCamp program. It continues to be not as much anymore but it continues to be a subject of contention. It's something that we feel very strongly about because the GPL is what makes WordPress possible. A lot of the WordPress ecosystem is based on people selling services related to themes and plugins. Licensing is a really, really big deal in our community. This is our initial set of rules. It seems like a pretty short and simple list. It is predictably packed with lots of secret issues that you get into when you actually try to implement a short and simple list of rules. For example, the trademark and licensing seems like it would be a no-brainer but then it gets complicated. What does local mean? Suburbs versus city centers. I was born there but I live somewhere else now but that's where my heart is. All of these things of what gives you the sense of this is my place. We argue about geography a lot in this program. It has given me a lot more respect for geopolitics. I will tell you that. So this was our starting point. Another new development right around this time is that if you wanted to organize a word camp you had to send in an application and then you would get permission to go ahead with that. Before we gave permission we would ask you to agree to these what we were calling at the time guidelines. Just to give you a sense of how the program has grown since, I was hired as the first full-time sponsored person to work on community programs in 2011. As you can see when we started actually enforcing these guidelines we had a big fall-off in number of events that were kind of inside the program and we very slowly kind of made our way past that benchmark and then beyond. We continued to hire people. We hired one person in 2013, another in 2015. By the end of this year the group of people who are paid to work on these programs full-time will probably be ten, with seven of those being community organizers and three being developers. All of these people are paid by automatic, which is the company behind wordpress.com to work full-time as volunteers for WordPress, for the WordPress open source project, just to be really clear. In 2011 when I got started we published an entire site called plan.wordcamp.org aimed at giving people more specific guidelines and standards and also just sharing collected wisdom from experienced word camp organizers. This was painful because what we essentially did is we called everything a guideline, whether it was a hard rule or a deal breaker or whether it was just a best practice. For the next two or three years we had active community discussions about what those deal breakers actually were and what were just the things we think people should do when they're organizing word camp. It was a little bit turbulent but we finally got there in the end. By 2014 we started shifting our language away from guidelines which we agreed were a vague over to expectations and agreements. We had always asked people to anyone who was a speaker, sponsor, organizer or volunteer to agree to all of these standards. They include licensing and then they include the values or the basic expectations of the word camp program. I want to run through the application process briefly because I know that this is new for this community certainly. This is how we run people through an application process. If you want to organize a word camp in Narnia you send in your application. One of our community volunteers vets the application. It's fairly long. It asks you a lot of questions. We look specifically for three main deal breakers. Is there a local user group? Is the person and is that user group active? Is the person who is applying to organize the event active in that group? They don't have to be organizing it. They just have to be active in the community. And then finally we go pretty deep on Google search for that person and all of their stuff like five to eight pages deep to see if we can find anything that would be an initial red flag for whether or not that person could successfully create a welcoming and inclusive space within our community. So we're really, we are careful about who we task with a very complicated and inflected job of creating a welcoming space in our community. We're real intentional about that. It's impossible to judge someone's ability to do that exclusively through vetting them. But it's our way to at least do our due diligence at the beginning. From, so if all those questions are yes, then we move on to an orientation. This is an hour long video hangout or zoom call where we discuss all of our expectations, so our hard rules, our best practices, things kind of global like ways we encourage people to approach the event design and the event organizing, building their team, what to watch out for, things that they definitely need to think about. And then we give them some information about the support structure they can get from us and I'll be talking about that support structure soon. We send them this agreement through HelloSign. They give it a little signature that way it's all official. That's not legally binding or anything. It just feels like it gets better engagement, like okay, now I agree. And then they move on to the pre-planning list. Just real briefly, after pre-planning they hit, they go to look for a venue because you need a venue to go to WordCamp. Once they have a venue and a preliminary budget, we have a second meeting, it's like another hour probably, to run through their budget line by line and make sure that everything that they want to spend money on matches expectations for WordCamp. This is where we get into the nitty gritty of what the event's really going to look like, right? And then also to make sure that their expectations are realistic. They haven't locked themselves into raising $100,000 when they've never had an event before, for example, stuff like that. Once we all come to agreement about the budget, they're put on the official schedule. They make the call for speaker sponsors, volunteers, all the people. I mean, this is the work, right? That last step is the work. We, you know, pay all the vendors and then you have your WordCamp. Backing up to the pre-planning stage, I'd like to talk a little bit about the tools we provide for our organizers. So as soon as you hit pre-planning, we give you a website on WordCamp.org. We have a large multi-site install and everybody's WordCamp website is hosted on WordCamp.org. We rolled this out in 2011. It was a little contentious and still tends to be a little contentious because we share user tables and hosting and a server with WordPress.org. So we're super, super serious about security. We limit the amount of custom code you can put on a WordCamp site. We limit it practically to zero. You can only edit the sites with CSS. There's no custom code, JavaScript or PHP. And that has been a slightly pain... It continues to be a pain point a little bit. We find a lot of our organizers really want to showcase the might and power of WordPress with this one event website. But we find that not having to bike shed about the website forever and ever and ever does tend to move the organizing process along more expeditiously. We also give people an official email address. This is currently just a forward. We don't provide mailboxes for anyone or anything. This has been complicated and hard for us to figure out. We still haven't fixed it yet. Another thing we provide is a registration tool. We built our own. It's called CampTix. It's on the WordPress repo if anybody wants to use it. It's not pretty, but it works. That is the summary for all of our tools. By the way, they're not pretty. They mostly work. We also put all of our tools on an SVN repository, including our base theme and all of our custom post types sessions so that community organizers could contribute to making the tools better. Just to give you an overview of what those tools look like, this is the back end of a WordCamp website. We have custom post types for speakers, sessions, sponsors, and organizers, which allows us to do some fun things as far as automatically creating grid schedules on the front end. It also allows us to do some automation of crediting community contributions on WordPress.org. To talk about that, I should back up just a little bit. In 2012, the WordPress open source project created a large number of community contributor teams. This is, I think, all of our icons connected to all of our community teams. These last four down here, marketing, command line interface, hosting, and to some extent testing kind of came on a couple, or became active a couple of years ago. We launched all of these teams and gave them all, of course, blogs to collaborate on. Then all of the work that's done to support WordCamps and Meetups are done through that little bowling pin icon, the community team. We tend to call it the global community team to emphasize the fact that we are international to all of our people. It's a good reminder for everyone, because one tends to make decisions, or want to have decisions made based on your local context. But we're always making decisions as often as we can based on the global context. Just another weird word we like to use for our commit level volunteers on the contributor team. We have a term we use for those which are deputies. These are not just our community organizers, like our Meetup and WordCamp organizers are on our team, whether they like it or not. But then there are also people who support those organizers on a volunteer basis by processing applications, mentoring camps, helping resolve conflicts, and those we call deputies. The kind of sassy automation part that we have is that in 2014 we connected WordCamp.org with WordPress.org profiles. So here you see a contributor who is part of a lot of different teams. Love me because she's a rock star. And she has, they're nestled between the plugin and the support team rep icon is our speaker icon because she was a speaker at at least one WordCamp, if not multiples. So here you see a community organizers profile. And also you can see in the activity update that David joined the organizing team for WordCamp Orlando a few months ago. The activity stream is something we've been experimenting with. We actually have the capacity to post an update when someone registers to attend a WordCamp or even checks in at a WordCamp. There are some privacy concerns there, so that's way on the back burner right now we haven't quite figured it out. So we could turn it on, but we haven't yet. Here's another profile. You can see that Josefa is a contributor to WordPress TV as well. That's that little video camera icon. One of the ways that the community team supports WordPress TV is through our traveling camera kits program. And back in 2010 we had a lot of organizers and a lot of events renting camera equipment so that they could video record their site, their content, or even live stream it. And we looked at that and we're like, well for like three camps renting equipment we could just buy the equipment and then just share it. So we ended up in 2011, we bought four kits. Actually we ended up with six kits by 2011. And these kits travel from camp to camp. They include a set of lavalier mics, video cameras, tripods, et cetera. And we ship them around to any work camp that wants them. They can if they want higher professional videography but it tends to be expensive. And so keeping our budgets lean so our organizers don't have to work real hard for sponsorship is a high priority for us. This year as of this year we have ten kits in the US, three in Europe and three in Canada because Canada and US shipping is ridiculously difficult. So we just have Canada kits. WordPress TV in case you didn't know is the place where we archive all of our video content related to WordPress. You can submit videos to it. And then this is where hopefully ideally in a perfect world every word camp session and in an even more perfect world every meetup session would be posted for anyone to be able to access and learn from. Currently we have content in about 36 different languages and we posted 1,750 videos related to 2017 content at the very least. So kind of last year although some of that may have been posted in 2018. We do cross post to YouTube but we also feel really strongly that owning our own content is important so we use this definitely as an archiving tool. I want to talk just a little bit about entity structure because the community team is our volunteer group but we provide a legal and financial entity as a backer of all word camps that we can. And this started in 2011. We had all these problems with word camp organizers getting into not a lot of problems with legal trouble thankfully but quite a lot of trouble with financial trouble. And then we had this nonprofit, the WordPress Foundation just kind of sitting around holding the trademark not doing anything. So as opportunistic optimists we were like let's use that thing, that seems great. And we started running all of the money for our community events through the WordPress Foundation. We rolled this out in 2011. We kind of slowly got all of our North American camps in by 2012. We launched support for European camps in kind of late 2012. We had most European camps in by 2013 or 2014. There are things that I could tell anyone who's super interested in operations and tax law about the fact that we then spun up in about two years ago spun up a B Corp as a subsidiary of the Foundation to use for as our legal and financial entity instead. Happy to talk to anybody about that later but that's what we're using now. We're using a B Corp instead. Again it's important to remember that no one who is overseeing any of this work works for either of these entities and either of these entities have any employees at all. They just exist to handle the money and the legal liability associated with our events. They also make it possible for us to do something that we call the Global Community Sponsorship Program. This is a program that provides a nest egg of sponsorships to every single word camp in the world. We launched it in 2013 and we've had consistently at least three to I think one year we hit nine Global Community Sponsors every year since then. This is roughly how it works. Don't be blinded by the gorgeousness of my slides. So if a sponsor wants to sponsor all of the events in our program but doesn't want to have to interact with, oh I don't know, 128 different volunteer teams, they can instead give the money to our entity, to our B Corp and then the Global Community Team will distribute those funds on behalf of the sponsor. In the case, we call it a Global Community Grant. In the case of events that are running the money through the B Corp, it really is just an entry on paper like, okay well of that money you get this much. For word camps that are happening in countries where it's difficult to move money to from the US, like India, Brazil, a couple of other places, we'll just send them the money and then they'll run the money locally for themselves. Taking in the ticket revenue and other sponsorships and paying their vendors directly. I'm going to talk about money in just a second so if you're like, ooh, I'll answer your questions. We build these sponsors based on anticipated or projected attendance in our programs but we distribute the money based on the need of the individual camp. So first time events may get as much as 80% of their fundraising burden taken care of by this grant because first time events have a really hard time raising money. You're not a proven quantity, you don't have sponsor contacts a lot of the time so we want to get them off and running and then slowly over time as a camp continues to happen year after year, we'll start reducing the amount of their grant as they create more sponsor relationships. The minimum that every camp gets is, well, sometimes as low as 20% but we try to hit at least 25% of their fundraising burden. So they get a grant and then they have global sponsors and then they have to credit those global sponsors just like sponsors and then also they have to raise local money. Since we're talking about money, let's talk about money. So because we're running all of the money through our entity this means we have to pay bills and stuff and we handle all of this as of 2014 through the backend of the WordCamp website. We have a suite of budget plugins where organizers and program administrators can track and communicate about how the money is moving around. We used to handle this all by email, never ever do that, it was awful. People would just email in there, oh, okay, sorry, it's really painful to be nice to those people. What we do now is say an organizer has a vendor that needs to get paid, they fill out this custom post type that is a vendor payment request. It is a lot of information, but then they upload the invoice to the media library of WordPress and they attach it to this post and then they submit it. And then the bill payer, Liz, get excited, there is a network admin of every single vendor payment request that's been submitted on mass from all of the WordCamps in the world and like I said, we're doing about 130 a year so there's a lot happening at any given time. Then the operations people can review these applications approve them and then bulk download a CSV file of wire transfers or ACH and then upload that to our bank and it's slick. I mean, bank software is terrible so it's not slick on their side, but it is, again, functional but ugly on our side. In 2015, we added, sorry, in 2016 we added a sponsor invoicing tool so you can request that we, well, you have to if you're running the money through us, request that we send out an invoice to sponsors that goes through our QuickBooks install and then attributing income. Once the sponsor has paid, we go through these requests every single day, we clear every queue every day for money and we will mark the invoice paid and then you as an organizer will get a little email and it says, hey, this sponsor paid, you can put them on your site now. Have a great day. Same thing with reimbursement requests, we also reimburse out-of-pocket requests and that's a separate budget plug-in just to keep it all straight. In 2016, we also launched our in-dashboard budget tool which is a way for all of our organizers build and maintain their event budget in the back end of the website and that makes it possible for all organizers who are on the site to see it and everyone who's active, super admin and the network to also see it. This, I don't know, you can't probably see it very well but once you fill out your prelim budget you hit that little yellow button and request a review. This sends an email to us, we set up a budget meeting and we go through it line by line. Once it's approved, then a separate tab is created for a working budget so we always have that approved budget on a tab that's locked so we can always go back and see what was actually approved and then the organizers can keep kind of, because you're tweaking your budget all the time as time goes on and that's what we used to check to see if the vendor payment requests actually match what we agreed to pay in the first place and before that we used Google documents like crazy and it was really, really hard to find everything and then editing was a problem and all that stuff so we're really excited about this tool very much a lot. That is the end of the WordCamp portion I'm going to run through the Meetup portion briefly so I'm going to take you back in time to 2012 and to when we started our Meetup program now again WordPress Meetups or user groups had existed before we had an actual Meetup program just like with WordCamps but the way we handled spinning up a set of standards was a little bit different. In 2012 we started up a pro account with Meetup.com and slowly started inviting groups who wanted to join. By 2013 we announced that a group of community volunteers would be collaborating on a list of what we call good faith rules. This has been a great way that term specifically good faith rules has been a great way to make open source people who typically hate rules, am I right? Putting good faith in front has kind of fixed the dislike of the term rules at the end so I'm very, very happy about that terminology change. We posted a set of proposed guidelines again we were using proposed guidelines at the time we discussed it all publicly had all of our fights we revised it slightly and then we are adopted. As you can see there's only five of them the main sticking points for groups to this day are numbers one and four. Number one just talks about how organizers need to act in the best interests of the community rather than working to promote themselves or benefit one particular community or group or company and again that sounds simple but in implementation it's a little bit complicated sometimes finding those balance that balance and then number four asks that or requires that any trusted member of the group can organize an event series in the group. We're going to get to that a little bit more in a few slides so I'm going to press pause on good faith rule number four and we'll talk about that a little bit more. So this is how that meetup program grew over time. Guess which year we hired a full time sponsored volunteer to work on meetups if you guessed 2015 you are correct. What we have consistently found is funded people to process applications makes a huge difference for any application based entry point program. The process for onboarding new meetup organizers is a little bit lighter than word camps there's no budget meeting luckily because generally we nips aren't handling a lot of money but it's in the beginning part it's pretty much the same there's an application we do the exact same vetting as far as whether or not the person will have issues making a welcoming environment in the group and then we also do an orientation that talks about these rules it's usually closer to a half an hour but it depends and then we do keep in touch with a monthly newsletter. We just broke 600 groups like last week so that's pretty exciting. Bonus points if you can guess what metric will probably be going out during next it's countries I'm really excited about breaking the 100 country metric next but the program's growing really well an exciting thing that we'll be doing soon is celebrating the 15th anniversary of WordPress with celebrations all over the world and communicating with meetup groups about that and that is the core of the meetup program I'm going to talk a little bit more about some of the issues we face with meetups as we talk about the issues we face throughout so next we are going to talk about community level challenges the first one I want to discuss is the issue of leadership succession or fixing entrenched leadership in a community the problem that we frequently run into once a community is founded is that our organizers will get tired or have life changes or have some reason that they want to pass on leadership to other people in the community very rarely there we also have problems with someone who's like I founded this community and this is my community and nobody can come in here because it's me me me me but generally if you give them time but both of those are problems and the rare problem is a problem from the get go but generally the problem is burnout or exhaustion or just hey I don't want to do this all by myself right because community organizing is a lot of work so we address this in meetups and word camps kind of from two angles the good faith rule for meetups that any trusted or reliable member of the group can organize an event is our way of addressing it from an entry point perspective right what we are telling people who are joining our community with that rule is that anyone who joins the group who is trusted by the group and that's the elastic part right how do you establish what that path to leadership is within the community how do you identify whether or not someone is trusted and reliable but we encourage people to make it as open as humanly possible to come in and organize an event series within the user group and the way we encourage organizers to use this is as a response to complaints frequently or as a way to get more programming in the user group that they don't personally find interesting or that would be difficult for them to do because of timing or time commitments so if everybody in the group really wants to have a Saturday morning meetup and you have your other thing on Saturday morning you can get anybody else to organize a Saturday morning event series and then they can handle that right if you have someone come up to you maybe you're a developer based group currently or most of your people are developers and then you get a blogger coming in saying all I want to do is talk about content management and blogging and stuff and you're like oh that sounds like the most boring thing in the world no thank you you can say hey blogger person who has ideas you have an idea you have a job here you go you organize that event series because anyone in our group can be a leader everyone is a leader in this event series or in this group and if there's a lack you can fill it right which is a very open source kind of approach right you scratch your own itch but it's sometimes because a lot of our organizers don't come to us with a strong open source foundation that's part of our process of training with our organizers is teaching them how we crazy open sourcing people approach some of these problems right by expanding the pool of leadership by sharing the authority with work camps we come at it from a different angle in 2015 a group of volunteers at the time although we hadn't that was also the year that we created the deputy program said you know what we really need we need term limits for lead organizers and I said you are crazy that it's never going to work and the internet will break no no no and they said no it's good we should do it and I'm like alright well people need to argue at you then because everyone will hate it and it has been remarkably very successful remarkably few people hated it I will say although we have a number of people who still hate it it is a painful thing because we stick to it pretty hard if you organize a word camp for two years in a row and you can't find one other person to step up and be the lead organizer even with you still on the organizing team you can't have a word camp the next year like you just can't you know and this is painful I mean you're a founder you put all this time and effort into this camp and now just because of some stupid rule because we're open sourcing people and we don't like those then you're just going to throw away all this hard work but from the perspective of the program if the work you're doing as a community organizer doesn't result in any possible people who are interested in taking leadership in your community then the job isn't done the job isn't organizing the event the job is organizing the community with organizing the event as the tool to make that community happen and that is that communication is something that we're continually working on right because we come to people who are like I want to make an event and we're like that's cool what you have to make as a community and they're like but the event we're like well yeah but you can't have that unless you have a community because then it's not a community event right and so basically shifting our people from being event organizer mindset to community organizer mindset is a consistent battle for us as mentioned we do a lot of training because none of our people are professional event organizers anytime we get professional event organizers in it's always a big fight because we do things weird right we do things in an open sourcing way so in 2015 we launched a training site this basically is just a series of quizzes for meetup organizers deputies and word camp organizers based off of our handbooks all of our handbooks are public so I encourage you to go check them out there are regrettably more than I think we need but you know more documentation that's a nice problem to have right the ones that we have quizzes for are the deputy handbook the organizer the meetup organizer and then the word camp organizer handbook last year we launched a training specifically for our commit level access volunteers our deputies that I'm particularly proud of because it has a module specifically on open source values and methods and as I mentioned a lot of our community organizers don't come to us from an open source background we have a large contingent huge contingent of entrepreneurs in the word press community and we have people coming to us from a business mindset which doesn't always mesh well with some of the more kind of distributed authority distributed open transparent processes of an open source process so this particular module talking about like both what open source is the value the values and methodology that we use in open source how we apply those to community organizing is something I'm really excited about another thing we focus on is outreach getting people attracting people from outside the word press bubble I know this is an issue for a lot of communities are open source communities right how do you get people who aren't actually in to come in we in 2017 our major feature launch on the community team was a dashboard widget which made it into core and now every single word camp or sorry word press website in the world that has been updated since 2017 has basically an ad for community events in the dashboard it includes all of the meetups that are part of our chapter program so that have been vetted and are part of our program have agreed to the five good faith rules it the widget guesses the location of the user but it can be the location can be reset by clicking on that pencil icon and so even if you're traveling with your word press website if you show up in Belgrade you can find out where the local user group is right there in your dashboard and this has resulted in at least a 31% increase of attendance at our user groups it launched almost exactly a year ago so we're still kind of judging how it's affected our word camp attendance but this has been a really powerful way for us to let people know that they are part of the word press community even if they didn't know there was one and to get them to our spaces we're also working on expanding word press community more from a top down perspective bringing word camps and word press community through intensive mentoring and what we're calling incubating through the incubator program we launched this in 2016 it resulted in word camps in Harare, Denpasar and Medellin it was in at its base it was an intensive mentoring program we had people apply to get help with starting a local meetup group and then organizing a word camp as kind of a lightning rod event to bring people in and get them active in a community two of the three of these communities are still meeting and have had another word camp since so that's a decent success rate for a pilot we're going to be running this event this initiative again this year with new communities another one of our focuses this year is promoting our diversity outreach speaker training we have an amazing curriculum of speaker training that is focused toward members of underrepresented groups in tech who may not think that they have a anything worthwhile to talk about at our events Jill Binder here in the front is going to be talking specifically about this program she's leading our working group tomorrow at noon in what I believe this program this program has been this training has been proven to work and to change the number the gender diversity at the very least of the speaker rosters in multiple word press communities so I am very excited about what we're doing with this the working groups job currently is just to promote this training to all 600 of our meetup groups and then to support any groups that want to run it and get more diverse list of speakers on their list so what are we still struggling with? lots of stuff as mentioned smooth and peaceful leadership transitions are a challenge for us keeping our word camp volunteers active year round is something that we'd really like to do and we haven't quite figured out yet and then of course developing our organizers as you may have internalized we have 600 meetup groups and only about 130 word camps last year so what we want to have 600 meetup groups more than that and 600 word camps every single meetup group should have a word camp our minimum viable product for word camp by the way is 50 people in a room all day talking word press that's what we consider a word camp right and practically any community can have that it's just communicating to our organizers that they can indeed do something that uncomplicated it doesn't have to be 14 tracks and 3,000 people it can be something small and inclusive not that big is not inclusive but it can be small and informal more precisely keeping cost low is a problem for any event series I think feels like venues and food get more expensive every single darn year and this affects our program by taking time out of our organizers schedule away from creating great content to raising money and we want our organizers not to have to spend more than about 20 hours for the entire project of the event planning process on fundraising if we can do that logistics and operations obviously moving money around internationally is hard and then just kind of more broadly like balancing that freedom of choice and independence with the values of the program itself right giving people making sure that people have a lot of freedom to iterate and innovate but while still expressing the values of word press some upcoming projects we've got we're probably going to be having more country level events we focus very closely on local events but we're experimenting with kind of more big tent events we have two flagship events we're camp us and we're camp Europe looking at maybe adding some flagship events to our schedule over the next five years we would love to have a sassy personalized schedule picker like you have here at Drupal con we're like this close to launching it I would love to have a budget snapshot tool that makes it easier for our organizers to know exactly how much money has come in exactly how much has gone out and where they may need to cut would love to provide more financial support to our meet up user groups if they need it we definitely need to do more training for our organizers for how to handle code of conduct issues and as we continue to scale up we may have to look at automating some of our training or even our budget review processes to just get a little bit less meeting and a little bit more streamlined with some of that stuff but that's a lot of stuff thank you and I'm happy to take questions here or outside in the hall or any other time and if you have a question please come up to the mic so that we can include it in the archival thing of this. Okay I had like a thousand questions but I wanted to start because my head's exploding a little bit this is great and there's a lot of really great goodwill in the Drupal community but being able to we're doing it in a federated way all around the world there's a lot of people just doing it in their own pockets and we don't have an Andrea so do you have any just like from a high level perspective if you've done this for a while now and you've kind of gone from top down and I know you've you know up and down and cross actually too but how would you recommend us proceeding again from a standpoint of probably hundreds or dozens of really willing people to you know work with the DA the Drupal Association to maybe help us do a better job and we may not have the funding as a project to have an Andrea there I would like to be able to say that I thought not you didn't need a full time sponsored volunteer to do this work but I don't think you can do it I don't think you can run programs like this without having full time sponsored volunteers on this specifically because events themselves have deadlines and when you're handling money you have to pay stuff on time and you have to process applications on time and if it weren't deadline based for conferences you could probably get away with it with meetups if you had enough really dedicated volunteers to do meetup support but when you're supporting events that have deadlines of paying bills and having an event at a certain time you've got to have someone who has the time to do the mission critical stuff we really tried when we were onboarding all of the people in our deputy program we wanted to give them the mission critical jobs too but we found that the comfort level of trusting a volunteer who's doing stuff as they can get to it with stuff like paying a venue is just too much risk I mean I have lots of ways that the Drupal community could pivot with community program support I don't think the way we're doing it is necessarily the right way for everybody it's the way that's working for us it was incredibly, incredibly painful to be the person who got a whole bunch of do it yourself or founders of word camps that had been doing stuff without any rules at all for years and held them to set of rules that in that particular set of rules they did not have a say in that was a really really hard two or three years of my life so it's not work that I think people would be able to do long term without being paid the emotional labor is through the roof doing it on a volunteer basis would be really hard I also have many many feelings about all of these and it's an incredible question everything is amazing with regard to the handbook documentation how much of that was generated by your team versus the community and how long a process was kind of working through that documentation the documentation so plan.wordcamp.org was written by one by Jen Milo in a weekend because she is made of rainbows and magic but she had gone to like 50 word camps a year for a couple of years so like she and she's a UI genius also so like she had all of these like user experience observations and had seen a broad cross section of what everyone was doing and talked to all of our organizers and knew exactly like this works within our values this doesn't work within our values all that stuff all the best practices stuff the rulesy stuff was also pretty top down like but the meetup documentation I think we wrote too right that was sponsored volunteer work Giuseppe was the person we hired in 2015 to do the meetup just to out Giuseppe she's doing a great talk tomorrow on mid-market CMSs if you're interested yeah our community continues to help support and maintain the documentation and we do change the documentation periodically but that major task was done by sponsored people Giuseppe is sharing that the current set of documents that we have weren't stable until we moved them on to the to make community for about a year after that for about a year after that yeah it was a good presentation I liked it who handles the logistics of the AV equipment you said you bought all that stuff who stores it and where do you put it that is a volunteer actually we're on our second like main movie around the volunteer in the US at least who periodically has the kits shipped back to him and then checks all the equipment to make sure it's still working when we retire kits we retire them to meetup groups unless they're broken but when the stuff is a little old we'll give it to a meetup group to use but we have community volunteers and also we have a huge set of moderators for the WordPress TV team who review all of the videos before they go on WordPress TV and approve or don't approve them as per the standards for WordPress TV publication do you find that you have to use the budgeting as a hammer to make people comply to the rules that's a good question or do people just generally go along with where we work we have a web standard everything has to look a certain way just like we did at Drupal last year do you end up using that or do people just the place where we are most likely to have an argument with an organizer who has already been onboarded is definitely the budget meeting budget reviews are the last thing that our volunteers end up helping with because it's the hardest job because you have to be ready to tell people no that's a place where we tell people no and you have to tell them why so that they'll keep working on the event and so but no the budget there is a hammer aspect but we have deprecated most of our hammers through better vetting and onboarding we try now to tell people all the unpalatable stuff that we're asking them to do upfront and if they don't like our unpalatable stuff hopefully they will recuse themselves sometimes they lie and they say yes that unpalatable stuff is fine but they'll definitely do that and then they don't do it and that's when we have to have a series of conversations about like no but you can't do that anymore or you have to do this thing and that's where the two year rule also has an advantage because we have a guaranteed succession no matter what whether the person is good or not we don't eject organizers very often I think we've canceled events that were on the budget meeting probably at the budget meeting and then we have asked in the entire last seven years only one person never to organize for us again just one more question you mentioned 31% increase where do you collect that data meetup.com's API so near the beginning you talked about the application process workflow can you know things I don't know when I need to stop talking I think pretty soon but yes so do you have any kind of general numbers that you can say now or is there a place where maybe we could find out later what the total number is at like each point here so it's like 3200 and then at the end it's like four or it's just a general kind of idea I don't know what our annual number of applications is off the top of my head we haven't collected it but we could we have a public page where we show what applications have come in and what the response was it's on central.wordcamp.org and that page also shows how old the application is and what stage they're in this process and if they were rejected it says rejected so there is a place where you can go check it's like oh I'm in Toulouse has anyone applied before oh there's an application in process I'll try to check in so yeah yes last question Kathy's question set me up about the application process if someone doesn't pass on the vetting portion is there do you go back to them with training on why they didn't get approved or how they can put them on a path to how they can become a host depends on which of these bullet points is their failure point if they don't have a local meetup then we say we would love to have UBR organizer first you need to start a meetup because otherwise you can't have a community program because you don't have a community yet and we funnel them into the meetup application process if they're not active in the meetup and there is one then we say hey get active in the meetup and then come back to us if there is a red flag for being able to create a welcoming event that's taken on a case by case basis sometimes we approach them and we're like this is not something that you could do as an organizer and just generally if we are going to require that you create this kind of environment it's hard for you to do and talk to people about how something could be problematic from a welcoming and inclusion perspective and then sometimes we just get back to them we're like we don't think that you're a good fit for our program so it really depends alright folks I'm going to wrap it up happy to talk outside or any other time I'll be in the open web lounge when I'm not in sessions I will be in sessions practically all day today thank you so much y'all should give feedback on the talk through the DrupalCon sessions page I love that tool so much I want one of those all of our stuff is open source and available if you go to make.wordpress.org slash community you can find all of it if you can't find it I'm on the Drupal Slack and also the Camp Organizers Slack under Andrea Middleton or you can tweet me happy to share all of our resources and all of my thoughts thank you for including me my welcome here has been so open armsy it's been delightful thank you presentation presented so expertly this is where we need USP we're some kind of fourths USP Tom this is great copy of the assignment okay so I wasn't really talking about like are you Drupal or Wordpress? okay I probably oh no no I mean I'm on the session selection oh actually it's so romantic yes so I just yeah thank you