Help the WordPress DC Community

After a number of very successful meetups over the last year, the local WordPress community in Washington, D.C., is growing fast in both size and strength.

The group offers some great education and networking opportunities, and the local community is becoming very involved. We’re very proud to have some great local sponsors and supporters, including Graph Paper Press, Site5 Hosting, Accessibility DC, and our hosts Fathom Creative. Next week, somewhere around eight local users and developers are presenting lightning talks. Not only are we typically seeing 40 or more at every meetup, we live-stream and record our events, too.

We’ve hosted some prominent community members, including Mitcho Erlewine, GPP’s Thad Allender, Theme Lab’s Leland Fiegel, and of course, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. We want to host more awesome events, and we also want to become a strong resource for the community.

While co-organizer Aaron Jorbin and I have worked hard to organically grow a community with local roots, the two of us are also heavily tapped into the WordPress community as a whole, and we hope to bring some of that awesomeness to D.C.

How can you help? Here’s some ideas:

If you’re coming to town, let me know. Our meetups are typically the second Tuesday of the month, but we’ve scheduled special meetups when awesome people are in town, and want that to continue. We’ve done all sorts of formats: presentations, town halls, demos, lightning talks, and social gatherings. Well, social gatherings happen after every meetup, but we’ve done those standalone too.

Send along a book: I’m giving away a copy of Professional WordPress Plugin Development next Tuesday, and the winning developer will be asked to review the book. There are a number of relevant and awesome books I’d love to offer to our members.

Send along some swag: While my more than two dozen WordPress shirts helps my stated goal of wearing a different one to every meetup, I’d love to spread the love a bit. Other items are welcome, too.

Send along a product or promotion: Lots of premium themes, plugins, and services are out there. Ideally, if we’re giving away a free product, I’d like to be able to also offer a promotion to everyone there. Contact me if you’re interested in supporting the community this way.

Provide a micro-sponsorship: Thanks to the amazing generosity of Fathom and others, we don’t have much in the way of costs. But we’d like to provide pizza and beer when possible, since not everyone has time to grab a six-pack on the way over to restock the Fathom fridge.

That’s about it for now — please contact me if you’re interested in anything. And seriously, don’t forget to let us know if you’re ever coming to town. We have a great group.