One of the greatest things about WordPress is its diverse community throughout the world. Kinsta has published a fantastic and inspirational post that looks at up and coming WordPress communities in 5 continents and 17 countries.
My favorite story is Juanfra Aldasoro, co-organizer of WordCamp Buenos Aires, describing how the WordPress community in Argentina was organized. In 2007, Buenos Aires hosted the first WordCamp outside the US. Despite hosting a few more WordCamps, the community lacked organization. Aldasoro explains how celebrating WordPress’ 10th anniversary brought the right group of people together:
When WordPress turned 10, in May of 2013, thanks to a banner in the Codex site we created a celebration meetup. More than 20 people showed up, and the good thing was that we were a bunch of geeks on the same track. We had the people but we were lacking an organization. The ones interested in having an organized community kept in touch, we formed WordPress Argentina (@wpargentina) and during 2014 we started to hold more formal monthly meetups.
One of the things I noticed is that several of the people featured in the article use Facebook groups for communication. Although a number of US based WordPress meetups use Meetup.com, in other countries, Facebook appears to be the dominant way to communicate and organize members.
Meetups are grassroots efforts that help WordPress reach every corner of the globe. As Matt Mullenweg said during his 2014 State of The Word presentation, “Organizing a meetup is one of the hardest things to do in terms of contributing to WordPress. Every single month, you have to come up with new stuff.” Those who help maintain community as a pillar of WordPress’ success are helping to maintain its growth and popularity.
It’s exciting to think about the enormous amount of WordPress education, contributions, and learning that takes place across the world everyday, thanks in large part to people like those featured in the article. It’s wonderful to see so many WordPress communities around the world growing in size to the point of having their own WordCamps.
If you’re having trouble organizing a WordPress meetup in your area, let us know in the comments. Thousands of people across the world access the Tavern on a daily basis and we might be able to help connect you to others in your area.
Source: WP Tavern
