This post is by Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner
The past few days, I spent hanging out at the first ever WordPress Community Summit. It was organized by the WordPress foundation in Tybee Island, GA. This invite-only event brought together a diverse group of community members who have contributed to the WordPress community (code and/or non-code alike). I personally felt honored to be invited and be in the presence of some of the most amazing folks that love WordPress just as much as I do. The event had people in attendance from all parts of the world.
Countries in attendance: Canada, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, France, Romania, UK, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Scotland, Australia, Sweden, Brazil, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Serbia, Lithuania, and United States. According to Jane Wells, 32% of people in attendance were non-US based. Here is a list of all participants.
The goal of this event was to bring together core-contributors, businesses in WordPress, and non-code contributors at one place to encourage discussion in hopes of further improving the platform that we have all come to love, WordPress. The event was organized in an “unconference” style where everyone is equal. Each person was given a paper to suggest a topic to discuss (this could be anything from core enhancements, things that needs to be improved overall etc). We came up with some great discussion topics from: core enhancements, themes and plugins, improvements to the codex, internationalization etc. Once the topics were agreed upon, everyone broke into smaller round-table discussion groups. The goal for each group was the come up with action items and long-term goals. You can see the summary of discussions here and here.
Most folks booked cottages and shared rooms. My cottage buddies were Andrew Norcross, Konstantin Obenland, and William Davis. The floor below us was booked by Brian Layman, Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (aka Mitcho creator of YARRP plugin), and Aaron Jorbin. The entire event had a family feel. It really was a big nice WordPress family. The next day, everyone was at Jane’s bakery called Jitterbug Bakery. The sign reads: Eat. Drink. Blog. It was the first bakery that I’ve been to that has a book shelf full of WordPress books. Now that’s awesome.
Below is a gallery of some pictures which I stole from the web. Credits are in the gallery.
