 Those are open. You still have time to go. No, I'm just kidding. I'm gonna try and do this in English Let's start with a question. How many of you were at a word camp in Italy in 2014 or 2015? Come on. Where you where where where were you? Yeah, you raise your hand So yeah, that's correct. There were no word camps in Italy between 2014 and 2015 There were two meet-ups Milano and Roma and They didn't meet very often. Okay, they had meet-ups, but things weren't going as they should be So my name is Francesca. I'm a WordPress professional from Italy and today I'm here to talk about the Italian community what we did in the last 12 months Hoping to get more of you involved both in your local communities and the global project so WordPress in Italian We had translations from the beginning There was a very small group of contributors, but they did this So here you see them Paolo and Steve. They were the ones who started translating WordPress in Italian They are the GTE for the project and I'm sure that if it wasn't for these pioneers Today WordPress wouldn't be as popular as it is in Italy But Unfortunately having a translation having a localization is not enough to build a community So how familiar are you with Italians? How well do you know us? And I'm doing this in purpose How do you have ever been to Italy? Yeah, do you know Italians? Yeah, you know them you know us so It's a beautiful country and we are amazing people but in this particular matter of having a community We face two issues One of them is we don't speak English. We are very good at speaking with our hands. So you might Have the feeling that we can do this But it's all a show a big show that we're doing even skill developers They know the jargon, but they can't carry a conversation So if you can't talk to people and have a conversation you cannot really connect you can code together That's good, but you can talk to people and The other problem it's not a problem actually It's one of the most beautiful things we have in Italy, but on this particular issue is a problem We are a huge country With big local differences cultural differences, we have I don't know how many dialects and some of them are recognized as languages so they they have their own localization of WordPress and You have a dialect for every region and every city has its own sub dialect and the farther you go in the south The more people will speak to you in their dialect and not in Italian So despite having this amazing contributors starting from polyglots and then there were more people in other teams and despite WordPress being very Popular in Italy. There was a total lack of offline activities. We didn't meet we didn't even know we existed And also there's another problem. So I don't know how many of you know how open source project works So I know nothing about it I've been making a living of WordPress since 2010 and I took and I took and I took and I never gave back because I didn't know I could give back I'm not a developer So I said, I mean what can I do for this amazing project? Turn out you can do quite a few things even if you can't code and being part of a community is one of them So the majority of users of WordPress in Italy they did something like this They went to their hosting. They did a one-click install of WordPress and that was it The most fortunate the one that understood a little bit how things work went to the locale Downloaded the WordPress installed and that was it So yeah, that was the situation in Italy until last spring So how do you take this very sad wasteland? I just described and turn it in a blossoming me though that I think we are now the people okay, so in spring 2015 There were two meet-ups in Rome to meet ups one in Milan on one in Rome They were meeting once in a while and then all of a sudden things started exploding People were talking about WordPress everywhere. People wanted to do stuff all the time and There were different people different groups of people who started working on it. So on May 2015 at a conference I met this guy. Do you know they have some of you know this guy? Okay, so his name is Luca Sartoni. He's a growth engineer at automatic and The dude likes to talk like for hours. He can't stop. Okay, so WordPress is his favorite. I think all-time Discussion and then he can talk about a B testing and growth engineering And I don't even know what it is growth engineering, but he talks a lot about it But mostly he likes to talk about community and he really wanted to push us and have an Italian community So I met him and somehow in a couple of hours He convinced me to start a meet-up in Torino and start translating. I Had a friend even over there with the striped t-shirt And he was also talking about we were talking about starting a meet-up. Let's do this But we were all talking talking all the time and we never did anything So Luca type likes to talk But it's also wise and you know, you knew that other two people wanted to do the same in Torino one of them is here Maurizio Yeah, he's there You can see him here and Cristiano and Luca thought if we put them together and we couldn't be more different from each other because I'm taking care of business even is a web designer. They are the hard core developer dudes and Like we didn't know what he does because it was meeting for the first time some different universe And we did this this is the first meet-up we had in Torino we 60 people showed up I think we didn't know what we were doing the the evening if I'm thinking about it now It was a little bit weird. We had no direction I mean I babbled on stage for five minutes about how wordpress changed my life And then there was another speech and Maurizio gave a super technical speech There was no connection between any of the things but somehow it worked and It worked so well that at the same meet-up Oleg and Lyuba Lyuba is also here. Hello Lyuba Said hey, we want to join you it looks like even if it looks like you have no idea what you're doing It looks like fun. We want to come with you. So, yeah, there we are in December the six of us Having fun and doing this In the meantime, there was another group of people from Barletta Bologna Brescia Genova other cities in Italy. I Called them the fearless ones because they were the one who did what our grandparents did two centuries ago They expatriate they went they became word camp expats. They went to word camps around Europe and Some of them spoke even like France here some of them volunteered and it was very exciting For them and they really wanted to share this with someone So they like what they saw and they came back to Italy and they say We want to do this. We want to have this in Italy. We don't want to expatriate to go to word camps We want to do this here at home Have you been to word camps of ill? Who's been who was it word camps of ill? Europe. Sorry Petya word camp. You're sorry. I wasn't there and I'm very sad about it But I knew something big was going on because even though I wasn't there for 72 hours people pinged me like Constantly and so I knew something big was going to happen after after Seville a Bunch of people met there about 10. I think there were about 10 Italians and That's the moment where they came they went from dreaming to planning to action It was very quick and it happened In July we started using again tower Rosetta site. Do you how many of you are not? American or So you all have locale, okay? so in your locale site you have a Blog feature and you should use it It's great because you can push information from there everything you write in your blog Rosetta blog can be fed to your Dashboard of the localized version of wordpress that you're using and And it's cool. You can talk to people people at the beginning They will not notice because they're used to get the WP Tavern and other stuff in there But then at some point They will see that the content is different now and People started noticing that were news in Italian and people started seeing their cities name on The dashboard I was like well, what is Bologna doing here? I mean Isn't this the wordpress feed? So people started noticing people started showing up more to meetups and people wanted to open more meetups Because they saw Turino Jane of aroma Bologna Brescia, whatever and they wanted to have their own meetup, too So Rosetta is great to push information and I really really Suggest you go and use it. I don't know who Get in touch with your local team and say hey, let's use it to build a community because it's a great tool But we also needed to talk we are Italians after all so And we wanted to help each other and we wanted to share the excitement. We are easily excited about this kind of stuff So here are the true heroes of the story France and Francesco They were the ones who opened the slack instance for the Italian community and This made all the difference in the world because then we really started to talk to each other Having meetups all over Italy was great Every city some cities were doing better other cities were a little bit struggling So the offline activities were doing great But we really wanted to talk to each other and help each other and we wanted to go big We say hey, we went from zero to eight meetups now. We want to want to more we want to have a word camps We want to maybe apply to have a word camp Europe. I don't know So let's do this. We really needed to chat and Yeah chatting we did we did a lot of that we wrote for hours and It was amazing. It was the we called it the word press summer of love in Italy Yeah, we had so much fun. We you had people at every time talking and suggesting things and I Don't know it was great and it was really exciting. We open channels for every meetup. We open channels for Freelancers to exchange information. We open channels for TV shows, I don't know. I push to open a random channel to have gifts and Have random talks, but nobody's coming in so I'm always talking by myself and it's a little bit sad But yeah, we planned posts on on Rosetta. We built an editorial calendar. We had the town hall meetings We wrote guides to get into slack because it's not very easy to get into slack. Okay, if you have a local group So by the end of August we had eight meetups and now we we counted this last week. We have 12 and Two more are coming. Thanks to taco that is always pestering people to open up new meetups So they're gonna be other two meetups in Italy. Thanks to taco and his talk So, yeah, we talked we talked we chatted we wrote we hang out We did everything but after summer we really want to get together. We really want to met each other Talk face-to-face because slack is excellent, but we really needed to sit around the table have some food and talk so With the help of Sara Rosso from automatic and your own Jenny Wong We went on and we carried out Bizarre plan something not very common a standalone contributor day And it was great and I really recommend you organize this because they are great events We would meet for one day in Milano that was a bit central to everyone and We would get to know each other and also learn how to contribute to WordPress because at that point We had the local meetups, but we're still not very strong on the contributing part It took us a couple of months to organize this there were people from Milano Torino and Barletta who organized this Barletta is like a thousand kilometers from Milano So it's a big deal to organize this kind of event in Milano and come up from Barletta 10 people We had endless discussions on the most important thing of all Which is? food Yeah, that what the two main discussions were food and the wapu Yeah, Sara got in touch with some lead contributors and it was great we had a couple of sponsors that helped us with food and There were a bunch of people who came to help us and very happy to see some of you here today You really made a difference for us, so thank you so people came and They helped us and they helped us Working of course, but they really helped us understand the true meaning of contributing and giving back and The most important thing they did for us. They showed they didn't just tell us they didn't just say Go to the handbook. They sat with us and they say you see here. This is where you do this You see that that's how you do it. Let's do this together Okay, you should do that until they did it with us. They didn't just send instructions The people came and they talked to us It was very neat. I mean Petia and John were there and who else was there? No, no no one else It was good. It was So, yeah, so what we took home from this was of course the work But also the attitude to do more to help more people and to really give back and We really at that point. I think it was a little bit obsessive we were like going around evangelizing people about WordPress we looked a little bit crazy and and What we learned we really wanted to take home and and we worked in many teams There were many teams the same day But I think there were three teams that really made the difference for all the community in Italy. One of them is community Here see us working and the contributor table. We had a very good time We learned some best practices Jenny helped us with some very practical stuff Like what to do if you're stuck in a meet-up and nobody wants to talk and You don't want to have a meet-up. It is always a speaker and the attendees and you know the distance between them So she taught us a lot of things how to make this Fun and help other people do this. Of course, we had polyglots. Thank you, Petia and yeah go translate all the things because you know now the the localized the Intern in localized versions of wordpress have surpassed the number of downloads of American English wordpress so yeah, it's important to translate okay and translate all the things for the people that could probably Help do other stuff if that stuff is in Italian if it's in English It's a barrier that not everyone can cross and support Support is super super super important There are no stupid question. You don't need to be an experienced developer to help in the forums Do you know one? Do you all know how to install wordpress? Through an FTP. Okay, so if you know that you must know that in the forums There are a bunch of people asking for help with this So even if it this is the only thing that you know how to do in wordpress Go and help someone else do it You will make their day and you will feel good about it. So it's a win-win for everyone We now have also localized version of a forum. We were one of the first to have a BB to whatever and and Yeah, I say that I'm not a developer. I don't care about that stuff I just care that it works and it's fine and everybody has a good time So we have a couple of people who are very invested in helping and moderating and answering And if there is a support forum in your language, please, please, please go to go help everyone who needs help This is so important and Yeah, we're good so finally during this event we sent out the Application for word camp Torino that was the first word camp in Italy since 2013 and Last week 300 of us met in Torino to have the word camp And that's word camp Torino. Yeah We had a pretty good turnout. We had three we sold 310 tickets 290 people showed up we had 17 volunteers with 24 speakers and we had nine organizers We did it We also had talks in English because we felt good about Having a more open Community so we focused on the local But we were also very happy to have international speaker coming I think at this point they're coming because they're really enjoying the food and the culture not because they really want to Speak at a word camp in Italy, but it doesn't matter So they came that that's the important thing And we had an amazing contributor day and when I say amazing I really mean it we had 100 people Showing up. It's one-third of all the people that were at word camp and trust me. This is a huge number in Word camp us in Philadelphia. They had 100 1800 tickets and only just 300 people showed up for the contributor day so having one-third of the people there It's a huge achievement so we have some old friends showed up and Came to talk to us about translation for example in this case is Paolo that you saw in the first slide We had the core. We had mobile. We had support. We had TV. I don't know. What else we had We had the whole spectrum. It was very nice. We onboarded new people We tied at bonds with people that we already know and we made new friends Here is Andrea Maybe some of you know him. He was at word camp Europe both in Leiden Sofia and Seville. He's really into it like he travels to go there So here he is sitting in Seville. He's not alone. He has another Italian friend But it was more dramatic to have the photo of him alone. So for the purpose of the presentation and 10 months later Yay From there. He was one of the volunteers So we are here in track B in London. It's a pretty fancy and big word camp and Some of you are already involved in the community. How many of you are involved somehow in the community work not core not The technical stuff I don't care about the technical stuff. Okay, that's a nice number So for the other of you, are you asking yourself how to become more like Andrea? Are you would you like to be more like Andrea? Yeah, no, no, definitely best answer. Okay So here is how you do more like Andrea and you enjoy your being part of a community Show up first of all show up here today, of course, but Try to Actively and continuously show up Go to your local meet-up. This is so important if there isn't one start one Apply to host the word camp you might You might might get the idea after London that word camps need to be this they don't need to be this They can be 50 people at a community center With the sandwich brought from home. You don't need it to be catered. You don't need it to be sponsored You just need 50 people in a room talking about WordPress and enjoying the day together Help others have a body system in place what I mean by a body system This is this is was this is why slack was so important for us because Some meet-ups were doing really great and some of them were struggling a little bit. So They started asking questions and they say, how do you do that in Torino? How do you do that in Roma or we want to put out a flyer, but we have no designers with us Do you have a design ready? So this really helped and also make help others in your local meet-up because if you always have these Speachers where there is a speaker and the audience people will not get involved So you have to pester people really like go there like a jackhammer and say Next time you're a speaker. No, no, I'm sure. No, I don't care next time you're a speaker or do Q&A's do unconferences Do contributing sprints? They are very very good like get all the polyglots together for one morning and Do that and everyone will feel and make everyone feel welcome and help everyone so Also help other people in other communities if you have a system to communicate between you help others if you see that a city is struggling a little bit help them out and lend a hand if You are struggling Ask for help Don't be bitter about the fact that nobody shows up to your meet-up Ask two other people to help you out and they will Make it inclusive. I'm I'm really This is something very very important for me. So I'm gonna read something from the Code of Conduct We are committed to providing a friendly safe and welcoming environment for all regardless of gender sexual orientation disability ethnicity religion preferred operating system programming language or text editor This is from the Code of Conduct all the work camps need to have one Meetups are not formally required to have one, but I strongly suggest you to go read it understand it embrace it It's there for your own good. It's there for our own good. It will help us make it better for everyone Encourage diversity in Torino. We have an amazing group. We have so many female Coming up to the group because of this because we are there again. We're showing. We're not telling we are going to the meet-up the meeting was not something for 20 something white male developers it's for everyone and less but not least Have fun. I mean don't be heavy about it. Don't be super stressed about having sponsors and having speakers just go there and have fun talk about your favorite topic to this WordPress Have some pizza you have a shepherd pie, or I don't know what you eat in this part of the world Just make it a social event Make it a social event You don't need a sponsor to do so. You just need a good attitude for potluck nights Do you do you know what potluck nights are? They're so fun You should have one and talk about WordPress and there you go. You have a meet-up So this is our story. I'm very proud and honored to be here in London telling about the Italians I hope you heard something that will be valuable and helpful to kickstart your community or revive it as it was in Our case and if you have any questions, I'm here for you. Thank you Thank you very much. It's a very good talk. We'll open up the floor now if there are any questions. Can you place your hand in the air? Hello, have you got any word camps planned in Italy for the coming year? Yes, we do so word camp Milano just applied and They are having the orientation talk this week. So word camp Milano is coming up I think it will be in October We have to coordinate with you Dutch people because we like you and we want to come to your camp and we hope You're coming back to our camps. So, yeah Word camp Rome is going to apply. I think in May and there are talks about Puglia, which we will be very good. And I don't know anyone who wants to have a word I think after the first one It will be much easier because we have the experience and we can also help all the other people that want to apply and Hopefully many people will apply to host the word camp in Italy. So, yeah, please join us We're really fun. Even though we don't speak English and we do this all the time Perhaps even work camp Europe 2000 There was a hand over here, I think was there any other any other questions over here Hey Fred, thanks for your talk. It was really great. I'm reliving everything. It's almost awesome Could you tell us you mentioned you're gonna help like other local organizers? You have a centralized kind of team for support for word camps or no, we're just obsessed about it So whenever somebody has something what we do we have the slack the Italian dub Italian WP community a slack and And Yeah, we comb through all the chats and as soon as we pick up people So even if you're not like local to the town that's planning and yeah, you you help the local. Yeah, organize that absolutely last week there was a lengthy discussion in WP Katania Okay, they they have been trying to start a meet-up for like one year I think at some point some of us will just flew there and do that because sometimes you also need that Sometimes you need that sometimes you really need the jackhammer that goes and say now we're gonna do this Let's stop talking about it. And does it continue after that? I mean, do you if you if you go do it for them? Do you think no no we don't really go do but but we really encourage them to I mean I would go to Katania because the food is amazing. So yeah, probably good good go there if they don't pick it up soon I think I'll go there and start this problem But what we're doing with them for example One of the organizers in Torino Oleg I because I I watch what he's doing I've seen it like once in a week. He goes there and says so so what's going on, right? What are you doing with this and a few days after word camp? I saw they had a lengthy conversation where it was telling them like do that And if you need to help with this ask that one and if you not help with that look and at some point I think we We just sent them Google hangout invite and say okay. We're meeting for a hangout. I'm gonna tell you what to do Okay, great. That sounds amazing. Thanks Any more questions in the audience? Oh, yeah, sure Would you like someone to come over and set up Florence and set up? Oh Yeah, yeah, why not Florence doesn't have a meet-up Firenze Firenze doesn't have you're invited, but first you have to start in Kent Okay Thank you Who here has a local meet-up? So lots of hands who is gonna go set up and get involved in their local meet-up after yes, that's the spirit Okay Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you