WordPress is all set for growth. W3CTechs has the most popular content management system at 29.1% for the top 10 million sites. Among those sites that actually use one of more than 300+ tracked content management systems, WordPress champions a market share of 60%. These are the numbers for Dec 11, 2017.
Matt Mullenweg gave his State of the Word last week at WordCamp US and among other announcements, he published a few numbers from within the WordPress Community Team and about the WordPress Foundation.
WordCamps
WordCamp US was the 128th WordCamp for 2017 across 48 countries. That’s an overall increase of 11.5%. For all WordCamps, nearly 40,000 tickets were sold.
Over 1,000 organizers–all volunteers–make this happen. Additionally, WordCamp featured more than 2,300 speakers. The WordCamps would not be possible without the sponsors–more than 1,000 unique sponsors supported the community which kept the price for the attendees at $20 per day.
The biggest sponsors for WordCamps around the world are the Global Sponsors: Jetpack, WooCommerce (Gold) , GoDaddy (Silver) WPML (Bronze).
Eastern region only (Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific): Bronze: Bluehost. The Western region (North, Central, and South America): Gold: Boldgrid, Bluehost, Bronze: DreamHost, SiteLock.
Are you interested in sponsoring WordCamps? You’ll find the 2018 Global Sponsorship Program in the Community blog.
WordCamps are held annually in a city where the community comes together for one or two days about all things WordPress.
WordPress Meetups
Matt Mullenweg says, “I feel a lot of the community comes from more frequent events and we had a huge uptick in these events: over 4300 meetups now happening in 73 countries. We are just a hair under 100,000 attendees.” The number of Meetup attendees grew by 64%.
Mullenweg attributes the huge increase to the new Events Widget that was placed on the WordPress Dashboard in version 4.8. It shows meetups and WordCamps happening near the WordPress admin user, by location. As a result of the widget launching monthly attendance at meetups also grew about 31% on average.
Both WordCamps and Meetups are now run by the public benefit corporation WordCamp, a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation created in 2016.
WordPress Foundation
This year the foundation gave $45,000 to three organizations:
Hack the Hood
Hack the Hood introduces low-income youth of color to tech careers by hiring and training them as web consultants who build and promote sites for small local businesses (@hackthehood).
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering millions of free books, movies and audio files, plus billions of saved web pages in the Wayback Machine.
Black Girls Code
One of the goals of Black Girls Code is to empower young women of color ages 7-17 to embrace the current tech marketplace as builders and creators.
do_action Events
Do_action events are weekend hackathons where WordPress volunteers (project managers, developers, and designers) work with local nonprofits and charities to build WordPress websites.
This year’s local Meetup organizers hosted four do_action events which took place in Johannesburg, South Africa; Beirut, Lebanon; Cape Town, South Africa and Montreal, Canada.
Four more events are being scheduled this year in Bristol, UK, Pune, India, Zürich, Switzerland, and Cape Town, South Africa.
Go to the WordPress Foundation news pages for details provided by the organizers about ideas about “why they chose to do them, and how they feel about it all.”
If you’d like to organize an event, the do_action website lists the following ingredients:
- An active local WordPress Meetup
- A venue (and date)
- A selection of local non-profit organizations
- Willing participants from your local community
- Catering
- Sponsors
More information is in the published do_action handbook for organizers.
Donate online to the WordPress Foundation!
Now that WordCamp and Meetups are no longer part of the Foundation, Matt Mullenweg mentions that the WordPress Foundation now needs to diversify its donor base. Matt announced the online donation campaign on its website. You can make a donation of $10, $50, $200 and $1,000 per year.
From the Foundation website, we learned: “Money raised by the WordPress Foundation will be used to ensure free access to supported software projects, to protect the WordPress trademark, and to fund a variety of educational programs intended to increase understanding about WordPress, free software, and open source development.”
Some programs under consideration for funding include:
- Video recording of WordCamp and Meetup group presentations
- Intro to Open Source workshops, spreading knowledge and understanding of the open web and open source to parts of the world with less participation in open source
- Charity hackathons in which volunteers come together to build websites for non-profit organizations
- Live and/or video workshops about how to use and develop for WordPress
- School mentorship programs to encourage interest in WordPress/open source development
- Improving documentation about how to use and develop for WordPress
WordPress.TV
The videos from WordCamps and Meetups are published on WordPress.tv. The entire “State of the Word” presentation with Matt Mullenweg is available on WordPress.tv as well as on YouTube.
All graphics in this post are from the presentation slidedeck of the State of the Word and is available here.
Featured Photo by David Needham
I have been a deputy on the WordPress Global Community Team since 2014 and I co-organize our local WordPress Meetup in Southwest Florida. This year I attended WordCamp Europe which included Contributor Day, and I traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, for WordCamp US where I volunteered for the Social Media Team and participated in Contributor Day as well.
This is the second post about WordCamp US.
The first post was about Gutenberg during State of the Word. I have been updating a Storify since WordCamp Europe when Matt Mullenweg unveiled the Gutenberg plugin. Since the STOW, the Storify already had a few more updates collecting all the blog posts after WordCamp US.
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