WordPress Opens Applications for 2023 Community Summit

The WordPress open source project will be hosting a Community Summit as part of WordCamp US this year. It will take place prior to the main conference on August 22-23, 2023, in National Harbor, Washington, DC. The invitation-only event will be the first summit in six years, since the last one was held in Paris, France in 2017.

In the past the Community Summit was created to provide an opportunity for contributors to have important discussions and open communication channels about their work and the future of the project. A few proposed topics include streamlining contributions to components of Gutenberg that are already part of WordPress core, the importance of performance, strengthening the contributor pipeline, improving cross-team communication, modernizing and simplifying WordPress settings pages, to name a few.

“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,” Automattic-sponsored Community Team contributor Julia Golomb said.

“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.”

The application to attend is open to any contributor, regardless of how long they have been involved in the project. Golomb also said the event may include a travel assistance program so that no selected attendee is left out due to financial reasons. Applicants will be selected on a rolling basis to ensure enough time for those who need visas to acquire them. Organizers are aiming to notify all applicants by the end of June 2023.