WordPress announced that the application for Community Summit is now open. The 2023 Community Summit will be held August 22-23, 2023, in National Harbor, Washington, DC. The last Community Summit was held in Paris, France in 2017. 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. 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, 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.
WordPress aims 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. 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
WordPress held a call for topics before asking people to apply to participate. By identifying the topics that are relevant right now, WordPress is 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.