Matt also opened a thread for questions on his blog, so be sure to chime in there if you have any!

We’re going to explore if speakers — including myself — can do our sessions with the same content and at the same time that was originally planned, just online instead of in-person so we can achieve our goal of bringing the pan-Asian community closer together without putting anyone’s health at additional risk.

Regardless, I greatly appreciate the work everyone — from organizers to attendees,  speakers to sponsors — put into making this a big success. So many people have come together to create an event to inspire and connect WordPressers, and I am confident that this passion will carry through into the event next year. Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the virus so far, and we sincerely hope that everything is resolved quickly so that this precaution looks unnecessary in hindsight.

We’d love to see you in St. Louis next year, so mark your calendar now!

Sometimes though, passionate and enthusiastic community members can’t pull together enough people in their community to make a WordCamp happen. To address this, we introduced the WordCamp Incubator program in 2016.

The goal of the incubator program is to help spread WordPress to underserved areas by providing more significant organizing support for their first WordCamp event. In 2016, members of the global community team worked with volunteers in three cities — Denpasar, Harare and Medellín — giving direct, hands-on assistance in making local WordCamps possible. All three of these WordCamp incubators were a great success, so we're bringing the incubator program back for 2018.

Where should the next WordCamp incubators be? If you have always wanted a WordCamp in your city but haven’t been able to get a community started, this is a great opportunity. We will be taking applications for the next few weeks, then will get in touch with everyone who applied to discuss the possibilities. We will announce the chosen cities by the end of March.

To apply, fill in the application by March 15, 2018. You don’t need to have any specific information handy, it’s just a form to let us know you’re interested. You can apply to nominate your city even if you don’t want to be the main organizer, but for this to work well we will need local liaisons and volunteers, so please only nominate cities where you live or work so that we have at least one local connection to begin.

We're looking forward to hearing from you!

The title says it all. We had some great applications for cities to host WordCamp US after we finish up in Philadelphia this year, and the city chosen for 2017-2018 is Nashville, Tennessee.

Based on the other great applications we got I’m also excited about the pipeline of communities that could host it in future years as WordCamp US travels across the United States and gives us an opportunity to learn and love a new city, as we have with Philadelphia.

By the way, if you haven’t yet, now is a great time to take the Annual WordPress Survey and ask your friends to as well.

Photo Credit.

This has been successful in many areas — there are currently 241 meetup groups on our meetup.com chapter program! In some regions, though, enthusiastic volunteers have had more of a challenge getting things started. Because of this, we’re going to try an experiment this year called the WordCamp Incubator.

The intention of the incubator program is to help spread WordPress to underserved areas through providing more significant organizing support for a first event. In practical terms, this experiment means we’ll be choosing three cities in 2016 where there is not an active WordPress community — but where it seems like there is a lot of potential and where there are some people excited to become organizers — and will help to organize their first WordCamp. These WordCamps will be small, one-day, one-track events geared toward the goal of generating interest and getting people involved in creating an ongoing local community.*

So, where should we do these three events?  If you have always wanted a WordCamp in your city but haven’t been able to get a meetup group going, this is a great opportunity. We will be taking applications for the next week, then will get in touch with everyone who applied to discuss the possibilities. We will announce the  cities chosen by the end of March.

To apply, fill in the application by February 26, 2016. You don’t need to have any specific information handy, it’s just a form to let us know you’re interested. You can apply to nominate your city even if you don’t want to be the main organizer, but for this experiment  we will need local liaisons and volunteers, so please only nominate cities where you live or work so that we have at least one local connection to begin.

Thanks, and good luck!

* For the record, that describes the ideal first WordCamp even if you have an active meetup — there’s no need to wait until your group is big enough to support a large multi-day event, and small events are a lot of fun because everyone has a chance to be involved and get to know most of the other attendees.

This year the speaker lineup is stellar. There will be talks by three of the lead WordPress developers: Andrew Nacin, Helen Hou-Sandí, and Mark Jaquith. We’re also looking forward to speakers like Jenny Lawson, also known as The Bloggess, and Chris Lema. If you’re at all interested in the web, you will appreciate the appearance of Jeff Veen – one of the creators of Google Analytics and co-founder of Typekit.

Even though San Francisco is far far away for most of you, you can still be part of the fun and watch all presentations in real-time via livestream:

Get a livestream ticket and watch all talks from WordCamp San Francisco live

If you hurry, you can get one of the special livestream tickets, including a WordCamp San Francisco 2104 t-shirt. You can find all the technical details and start times at the WordCamp San Francisco website.

Here are the WordCamps on the schedule for the rest of this year.

October 25-27: WordCamp Boston, Boston, MA, USA
October 25-26: WordCamp Malaga, Spain
October 26: WordCamp Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal
October 26: WordCamp Sofia, Bulgaria
November 7: WordCamp Cape Town, South Africa
November 9: WordCamp Porto, Portugal
November 9-10: WordCamp Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya
November 15: WordCamp Edmonton, AB, Canada
November 16-17: WordCamp Orlando, FL, USA
November 16: WordCamp Denver, CO, USA
November 23-24: WordCamp London, UK
November 23-24: WordCamp Raleigh, NC, USA
November 23: WordCamp São Paulo, Brazil
December 14: WordCamp Las Vegas, NV, USA
December 14-15: WordCamp Sevilla, Spain

No WordCamps on this list in your area? Not to worry! There are thriving WordPress meetups all over the world where you can meet like-minded people, and we maintain a library of WordCamp videos at WordPress.tv.

Get Involved

• If you’re interested in organizing a WordCamp in your area, check out our WordCamp planning site.
• If you’re interested in starting a WordPress meetup in your area, let us know and we can set up a group on meetup.com for you.
• And speaking of WordCamp videos, we’ve recently enabled volunteer-generated subtitles/closed captioning of the videos on WordPress.tv to make them more accessible. Interested in helping? Check out the WordPress.tv subtitling instructions.

Whether serving in the military, living in an area of unrest or attack, having friends or family in the fray, or just being human enough to think war sucks (there’s really no gentler way to say that, is there?), war impacts most people in the world today.

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. Sometimes we’re fortunate enough for that to mean providing a platform for communication that helps people work toward peace in their communities and around the world. Sometimes it means providing a platform for keeping people informed and aware of the other things that are happening around the world, including the horror of wars and revolutions.

At WordCamp San Francisco in August, one of the most popular and well-respected sessions was led by Teru Kuwayama of Basetrack.org. On this day of remembrance, I thought it would be good to share the video of his presentation. Not only is it a very cool example of how WordPress can be used in unexpected ways (this is not your father’s Oldsmobile usual blog), it’s a reminder of how much work still needs to be done to move from war to peace. So here is Taking WordPress to War: Basetrack.org. Peace out, yo.

3.3 Hackathon

WordPress 3.3 is about to hit feature freeze. This means it’s the last chance to squeeze in features that haven’t quite been finished, and enhancements and fixes that no one has had time to address yet. Around this time, there are often dozens of tickets that have patches, but the patches have not been tested enough to be committed to core. Then the contributors who worked hard on the patches are disappointed that their code doesn’t make it into the current release. You can help us prevent this!

This weekend, we’ll be running a has-patch needs-testing marathon for the 3.3 milestone. Basically, we’re looking for people who can help test patches and/or refresh patches that need updating. Lead developers and core contributors will be hanging around in the #wordpress-dev channel on irc.freenode.net to answer questions as needed, and will be committing patches as they get enough verification. As you test the patches, report your findings on the trac tickets in question. If all developers who make a living working with WordPress helped out for even an hour or two this weekend, we could clear the 200 tickets or so that are in this situation. To make it fun, why not get together with other WordPress devs and have an in-person hackathon meetup?

WordCamp Portland

At WordCamp Portland this weekend, some of the WordPress core team will be in attendance, including me, Nacin, and Koop. In addition to giving presentations and participating in the unconference sessions, we’ll be involved with a couple of other cool things at WCPDX:

• Hacker Room. There will be room set aside for people to work on core bugs and features slated for the 3.3 release. Hopefully PDX developers will hang out in here some of the time helping with the marathon.
• Welcome Free Software Projects! Normally WordCamps are 100% focused on WordPress, but in light of Software Freedom Day, the WC PDX organizers, in conjunction with the WordPress Foundation, would like to extend an invitation to all free software projects to participate in WordCamp Portland. There are a couple of rooms set aside that can be used for unconference sessions and/or hacker rooms for other projects. It would be great to have local representatives from a bunch of projects there — almost a micro version of OS Bridge or OSCON — to maximize the free software love and cross-pollinate ideas. Developers from other projects are also welcome in the WP hackathon room if they’d like to pitch in. Saturday will also feature the Software Freedom Day Happy Hour at the end of sessions. For more information or to get your project involved, contact the event organizers via the WordCamp Portland website or email support at wordcamp dot org.
• Usability Testing of 3.3 Alpha. As mentioned, we’re about to hit freeze, so we’ll be giving WordCamp Portland attendees a sneak peek at 3.3, seeing how they adjust to the new features, and getting feedback to help us with our last round of fixes before we get to Beta. There will be a signup sheet to participate.

So, if you live it the Portland/Seattle area and haven’t already bought a ticket to attend WordCamp Portland, hurry up, as it’s going to be a great celebration of Software Freedom Day and WordPress.