Team Descriptions
Below, you’ll find a description of the teams that work behind the scenes to make WordPress Accessibility Day happen.
Event Planning Teams
APAC
Current Year Team Lead: Ricky Onsman
The APAC team is a group of organizers located in Asia-Pacific countries. Leading up to the event, the APAC team supports the marketing team to ensure we receive sufficient speaker and volunteer applications from these regions. During the event, APAC team leads keep the event going while the Americas-based organizers sleep.
Marketing
Current Year Team Leads: June Liu and Michelle Frechette
The marketing team plans and oversees all event marketing, including creating graphics for sessions and sponsors, writing blog posts, scheduling social media, and sending emails to our email list. This is one of the most task-intensive teams that is busy throughout the year in order to ensure that we receive quality speaker applications, high attendee registration, and fulfill our commitments to sponsors.
The marketing team has roles for people with a variety of skill sets, including graphics creation and writing. Platforms in use by the marketing team are Canva, Mailchimp, Buffer, Google Sheets, and WordPress. Familiarity with these platforms is useful but not required. Training can be provided.
Post-Event
Current Year Team Lead: Ricky Blacker
The post-event team is responsible for editing session videos, coordinating with the transcription vendors to get them captioned, and adding the videos, captions, and transcripts to YouTube and the applicable event website. In addition, the post-event team plans a virtual organizer after-party that takes place via Zoom, selects and notifies t-shirt winners, and handles other loose ends after the event.
Speakers
Current Year Team Lead: Ryan Bracey
The speakers team reads and reviews all speaker applications through an anonymized process, then meets and selects speakers. After speakers are selected, the team works them into a schedule, confirms that they can speak, and communicates with speakers up to and during the event. If you’re interested in having a say in WordPress Accessibility Day’s content, this is the team for you.
Sponsors
Current Year Team Lead: Bet Hannon
The sponsors team creates sponsorship tiers and pricing for the event, then finds sponsors to provide the funding necessary for running the event and ongoing operational costs. They identify potential sponsor companies and reach out to them, in addition to responding to sponsorship inquiries that come in organically. Having sales or previous sponsor-seeking experience is helpful for the outreach component but is not required.
After sponsors are identified, the sponsor team gets the sponsors to sign contracts and follows up to ensure payment is received. They also work closely with the marketing team to ensure that sponsor benefits are fulfilled as promised. After the event, they send a thank you email to sponsors and solicit feedback for improving sponsor experience in future years.
Technology & Vendors
Current Year Team Lead: Isla Waite
The technology and vendors team is responsible for coordinating the technology used to run the event (Zoom) and accessibility service vendors (captioning, sign language interpretation, transcription). They maintain the technology information in speaker and volunteer handbooks, run practice sessions, and ensure that vendors have information as needed leading up to and during to the event.
Volunteers
Current Year Team Lead: Adrienne Grace
The volunteers team selects, schedules, and assists the volunteers who help run the event. This team is most active in the latter months of the event, reviewing volunteer applications over the summer and creating a schedule for volunteers a few months before the event. They maintain the volunteer guidebook and run training sessions with the technology team via Zoom. During the event, they support volunteers as needed to ensure the event runs smoothly.
Ongoing Teams
Accessibility
Team Leads: Amber Hinds and Joe Dolson
While accessibility is something every organizing team member is expected to pay attention to, the accessibility team makes sure that we practice what we preach. This team has intermittent responsibilities for accessibility testing new web pages, forms, or event platforms. They also may create and maintain accessibility documentation for volunteers and new organizers. Native screen reader users or other assistive technology users are invaluable on this team, but anyone familiar with accessibility testing can help.
Translation
Team Lead: Joni Halabi
The translation team helps organize communication with the multilingual community to prepare translations of the captions of past talks. This team is active throughout the year, as the process of adding new translations is an ongoing need. Volunteer translators are welcomed at any time.
Website
Team Lead: Joe Dolson
The website team manages our main and event websites. Developers on the website team need to be capable of working with custom-coded themes and comfortable following a Git flow workflow while writing accessible, WPCS-compliant code. This team’s developers maintain a custom theme and a custom event schedule plugin. This code is available on our GitHub account for review.
Organizer Commitment
We divide our organizer responsibilities between team leads and team members. Team leads are generally returning organizers with a good idea of what goes into making the event happen and have higher commitment expectations.
Organizing WordPress Accessibility Day is fun, but it also takes a lot of work to ensure we have a great event. Here’s the minimum commitment required for organizers and what to expect:
Team Leads
- Expect to commit an average of 4 hours per week from February-October. Depending on the team(s) you join, some teams are more active at different times of the year. For example, the sponsors team does more earlier in the year, and the post-event team has a lot to do in the weeks following the event.
- Attend bi-weekly Zoom meetings from February through mid-summer, then weekly meetings through the event. Missing some is okay and expected; missing most meetings is problematic unless you’re leading the Translation or Post Event team, which allow for more async communication.
- Participate in our Slack channel and stay up-to-date on what’s relevant to your team. Track tasks as needed in our event Basecamp project.
- Be available for at least part of the event, which will be a Wednesday-Thursday early in October.
Team Members
- Expect to commit an average of 1 hour per week from February-October. Most likely, your tasks will not be divided weekly; you may spend 4 hours scheduling social media posts one week, then have no additional tasks the rest of the month. It’s highly variable by role and time of the year.
- Be available to perform tasks as needed, be responsive to communications, and attend organizer meetings if needed.
- Be an advocate for WP Accessibility Day and help promote the event on your own social media, website, etc.
- Be a good communicator and follow through on your tasks. Let your team members know if you can’t do something or need help.