Having seen the WP Y’all with them saying the WordCamp is postponed until April or May 2022 a post by Ryan Marks
It saddened me because, we all love WordCamps in the WordPress community or, you know, I say a lot.
There are 3000 people that I attended Bernie in Berlin Word camp rather
It was awesome.
I think there were actually 2600 people at Berlin, Serbia in Europe WCEU There were something like 1500 as well.
When I went to St Louis, there were 1500.
You know, these WordCamps are very, very important.
I met people, events work and people in other events as well.
And it’s helped me 1, improve my attitude towards community and 2, get involved in the WordPress community.
But it’s also made me some life long friends, people I stay with like Hans and Donata of Termageddon in Chicago, Vito Peleg, who I’m now co founder with Bertha AI on, whom I also helped with the promotion of WPfeedback., now Atarim , all done from events where WordPress people and agencies get together.
It’s essential, I think, for us to remember that covid is real, for us all to get vaccinated, if we can, for us all of us to remember that we’re getting vaccinated to protect people, that’s my stance.
My other stance is that WordCamps are pretty much controlled by WordPress Dot Com
The content of speakers, the type of things that you could speak about and as Automattic that’s headed up by Matt Mullenweg is a very commercial situation. He himself has Audrey, which is his own investment arm. I personally think that WordCamps need to change.
Yes, they need to be community driven and community supported and without the volunteers and they wouldn’t go ahead without the sponsors.
I’ve just paid for Porto €50, it’s unbelievably good value.
I get food, I get to meet my people, get to meet my friends, I get to make new friends.
But, I don’t get to learn about running a business.
I don’t get to learn about what it’s like living as a freelancer, living as an agency in the WordPress arena.
Difficulty with dealing with clients difficulties, with dealing with co workers.
I don’t get to hear about diversity issues, accessibility, WordPress seemingly ignoring the accessibility issues and definitely ignoring diversity issues within WordPress.
Yes, there are some very loud noises out there, but again, it’s a very few people that are shouting or saying things on Twitter about how developers of minority groups are just ignored, pretty much anyway., that’s what it seems like to me. And also to the voices that are screaming and shouting about it.
I think that WordPress as a whole could do a little bit more on promoting diversity within the WordPress community.
To do that, we need to have face to face meetings. It’s all very well having venues where they are virtual venues, I was lucky to be co host on the Atarim Summit last year.
That’s great to get 6000 people attending an event over a three or four or five day period. But, there is nothing like face to face.
So, as event organisers and as volunteers and as a person within the WordPress community, I’d just like to say we have to get real about face to face.
We have to make sure that where the venues are, they’re safe in as much as they are clean and they’ve got the right facilities for people to take protections for themselves, for people to exercise complete common sense. Also, too, make sure that people cannot come to that venue unless they’re vaccinated.
It’s not that vaccination helps you stop catching Covid or any one of the variance.
But I’m telling you now, my personal experience with my brother (he as triple vaccinated) he had covid for five days.
I have a personal friend had covid for six weeks, another friend when they weren’t vaccinated because there was no vaccination, more than four months.
Now, if you’re vaccinated, if you’re unlucky enough to catch Cove ID or any variant you’re looking at 10 days, my daughter by step son all got covid, within 10 days, they were fine.
Within three days, they’d stopped having symptoms, but they isolated for 10 days because those are the rules in the UK, So WordCamps.
Please be aware, as you are, because Birmingham WP Y’all have said we’re cancelling or postponing we’re going to look to open up in April or May now.
Hopefully, people within the area will be vaccinated and cases will be lower.
We will all be able to get back to WordCamps and enjoy the speakers that they’ve got.
I would like to see some more diverse speakers there.
I’d like to see some more commercial oriented speaking events at work camps.
Of course I do.
I’m a premium plugin owner and premium SAAS owner.
I think that we need to stop denying that WordPress makes people money.
Open source is great, Volunteers are great, But you know what? Contributors really do need to start getting paid or rewarded financially in some way.
Pay for their tickets.
Pay their flight tickets to WordCamps
Buy them tickets to WordCamps, buy the courses that they can learn even moor, whatever it is.
WordPress needs to up the game.
Let the thousands of people that are contributing to WordPress or WordCamp earn a little bit of cash so that they can have a little bit more in their back pocket.
One of the ways that we could arrange this is we could have a pay it forward. I’d be happy to buy someone a ticket to a WordCamp because I’m lucky enough to be able to afford an extra ticket or even two or three.
So let’s have a pay it forward, purchase opportunity and give the WordCamp organisers an opportunity to offer people who either can’t afford a ticket or need to be encouraged to come to a WordCamp to say, Look, we’ve got you a free ticket.
Well, maybe sponsors could say, Yeah, we’d love to sponsor you, but you know what? We want a third of the sponsorship to go towards getting people to the event that have never been to an event, have a lottery.
I don’t know.
I’m not sure that I agree with lotteries, but something has to be done to encourage people to attend work camps in the physical, apart from obvious covid things that we’ve talked about.
But essentially, there are things that can be done with the pay it forward with the sponsors saying, Yeah, I’d like to sponsor you, but I’d like to also contribute to somebody, at least one person coming to the event on us.
Let’s have a think about what we can do.
I’m happy to open the conversation to anyone and let’s make WordCamp truly for the whole WordPress community, the struggling freelancers, the people that are interested in getting into WordPress and, of course, make it better for the sponsors and everybody attending.
Transcribed by using Zipmessage – not just a way to have async conversations, its a way to write a blog post – verbally and then get the text automatically.