Earlier this month I organised a WordPress event. It was the first event I organised. It is also the first LGBTQ+ dedicated event in the global community.
One of the most common comments I got from attendees and other community members before and after the event was that the topics were not related to WordPress.
Last year, after WordCamp Barcelona, I got involved in the DEIB group and later worked with Marta Torre in writing a localised document on diversity and inclusion for event organisers in Spain. One of the conversations at the event was about managing diversity.
After WordCamp Europe 2022, the first WordCamp I ever attended, I posted online about how the community is so homogeneous that it can easily make one feel alienated. And someone in the community reached out to me to ask about this. The problem is they were looking for ways to prevent this, and I didn’t have a definitive solution.
Sexual and gender dissent is very important here. Society as a whole creates a norm and tells me I am outside of it. This is something I didn’t choose. But more often than not I am expected to answer questions or even defend who I am. This happened to me within the WordPress community. Dissent and rights were the topic of the second talk.
To promote the event I used short videos on social media. I haven’t had profiles on social media for some years now, except LinkedIn. I was appalled by the amount of hate and vitriol in some of the videos. All reports made had the same response: these messages did not break their TOS, so the social media platforms took no action. Some of the videos were reported, and I had to appeal to make them available again. This was the topic of the third and last conversation: how we communicate online and which strategies we use to avoid harassment and censorship.
These topics, directly related to my personal experience and involvement in the WordPress community, are not related to WordPress for many people in the community. Even my mentor shared this opinion — although she thinks this is only a problem with communication.
I still don’t have a solution. But I would love for everyone in the community to feel this is everyone’s problem and not only mine.