WordCamp Incubator Program Receives 182 Applications, Narrows Candidates to 16 Communities

In February the WordPress Community team announced that it would be launching an experimental WordCamp Incubator program. After a short application window of less than two weeks, the team received 182 applications from cities all over the world. Andrea Middleton reported that the team has narrowed the submissions down to the following 16 communities:

• Denpasar, Indonesia
• Chandigarh, India
• Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Thessaloniki, Greece
• Harare, Zimbabwe
• Budapest, Hungary
• Kalamata, Greece
• Kampala, Uganda
• Kochi, India
• Lagos, Nigeria
• Medellin, Colombia
• Nagpur, India
• Nairobi, Kenya
• San Jose, Costa Rica
• Udaipur, India
• Ulyanovsk, Russia

Some of these communities already have active local meetups and others have no organization whatsoever. Selection of the final cities will be based on the location’s potential to foster an emerging WordPress community.

The original plan was to incubate three WordCamps in 2016, but due to staffing changes the new scaled back plan is to commit to two events and intensively mentor a third. Middleton explained that the difference between the two is in the amount of support the local team will receive from the designated community team deputy:

Incubating an event will involve the deputy both advising local volunteers — acting as a kind of project manager for the team — as well as doing some of the organizing work on the event, like a lead organizer usually does. Intensively-mentoring will be more project management and involve less actual organizing work on the part of the deputy.

Middleton said the team is speaking with the remaining applicants about their communities and assessing their abilities to organize a one-day, one-track WordCamp with the help of the community team. The small events will focus on getting the local community connected for future events.

The WordCamp Incubator program is an intriguing concept that has so far received a great deal of interest from potential new organizers. Many locations in the remaining list of candidates are situated in regions that are not as easily accessible to existing WordPress communities. These are places that might not otherwise have an opportunity to host a WordCamp for years without a little boost.

We’ll be following the progress of the Incubator program to see if the experiment can successfully hatch a handful of new local communities. The three locations selected will be announced this month.