Thank you for the incredible response to our call for topics for the 2023 Community Summit, which will be held August 22-23, 2023, in National Harbor, Washington, DC.
The Community Summit is an intimate, in-person gathering of contributors from across the WordPress open source project. Attendance will be determined based on an application and selection process. In selecting participants, the organizing team aims to bring together diverse representation from across the project. This includes new and experienced contributors from across geographies, organizations, and Make Teams. The last Community Summit was held in Paris, France in 2017 and we’re excited to bring together contributors again.
It’s now time to determine which contributors will gather in person at the Community Summit. Community Summit attendance has always been by invitation-only, in order to keep the discussion groups small enough that everyone present can interact and participate. In the past, our Community Summits included a travel assistance program to ensure that no invited contributor was unable to attend for financial reasons. That will also be the case with this year’s event. Our goal is to have a diverse and inclusive summit that provides a safe and encouraging space for our dedicated contributors to work on the WordPress project and the problems we encounter within it. We’re aware that many factors make up a diverse project, and strive to organize a Community Summit where anyone can participate regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
Some of the past goals that brought us together are still viable today:
- Build bridges between the people making WordPress (via the contributor teams) and the people doing the best and most influential work built on top of it
- Open channels of communication between project leaders, volunteers, and professionals in the community
- Learn more about each others’ goals, challenges, and ways we can help each other
- Share best practices
- Have some social time and get to know each other better
This year we want to follow and build upon the formulas used in the past. We iterated this year by holding the call for topics before asking people to apply to participate. By identifying the topics that are relevant right now, we are positioned to build the invited participants list in a new way, mixing in the long-time contributors we need and including newer contributors who haven’t yet had the opportunity to contribute in this way in the past.
Some proposed topics that may be discussed at the Community Summit include:
- Streamlining contributions to components of Gutenberg that are already part of WordPress core
- The importance and value of performance for WordPress.
- Improvements to multilinguality in WordPress community
- What could central.wordcamp.org do better in this new era?
- What process can we put together to handle old Trac tickets?
- Strengthening the WordPress contributor team pipeline
- How does WordPress adopt an accessible-first approach?
- Trust & Safety in the WordPress ecosystem: Handling content moderation and sensitive content
- Strengthening cross-team communication and collaboration to reduce friction across the project
- Modernizing and simplifying the WordPress existing settings pages
- Unifying the backward compatibility policies within the wordpress-develop and gutenberg repos.
We will continue to accept topic submissions on an ongoing basis.
So who should apply? You should! We want to hear the voices of a diverse cross-section of contributors, regardless of how long they have contributed to the project. All are welcome to apply, but we have to limit the number of participants in order to ensure productive in-person discussions.
In order to allow contributors who need visas to attend, we will be doing rolling acceptances. Our goal is to have all contributors that are accepted notified by the end of June 2023.
Please fill out the application for yourself and submit it.