The Swedish WordPress community is relatively small in terms of user base, but it is growing. Broadening from the core of developers to the massive user base could be a way forward.
The Swedish WordPress community hardly gathers more than a few thousand people, while the core of driving people can be gathered in a regular conference room:
- The WordCamp conference in Sweden usually gathers between 100 and 200 participants.
- MeetUp Wordpress Stockholm has just over a thousand members and Meetup Wordpress Norrköping almost a hundred.
- The Facebook group WordPress Sweden has 8006 members
- The Facebook group WordPress Utveckling has 2585 members
- The website Wordpress Sweden has 4000 visitors during one month
The community is largely made up of people who work with WordPress professionally and are developers. But since WordPress is used by 46 percent of all Swedish sites, according to the analytics service BuiltWith, the potential should be many times greater.
– The Swedish community has had an ability to divide itself. Partly users and partly developers. A rather sad reality, I think. Personally, I think that these divisions could achieve much more together. However, developers have been happy to withdraw and stay on their side. I think that a more genuine open source spirit in the Swedish community would make us more cohesive than we actually are today,” says Mattias Tengblad, active at Wordpress Sweden
Angry Creative has chosen to be active in the community by organizing WordCamp Norrköping and Meetup WordPress Norrköping. We are also happy to go to WordCamps and Meetups in other cities.
Niklas Högefjord at the Wordpress agency Krokedil in Arvika is also active around WordCamp and participates diligently in Meetups. He would like to see active Meetups in all major cities in Sweden.
– “I feel that the community is more active in both Norway and Finland. We would need recurring Meetups in more cities than Stockholm, says Niklas Högefjord.
He recently helped to organize a WordPress Meetup in Karlstad with just over 20 participants. There are also Meetup groups in larger cities such as Gothenburg, Malmö, Uppsala and Norrköping. All with varying degrees of commitment.
– In other countries, there are events around WordPress that do not focus on development but, for example, business. I think it would be good if we broadened the community beyond the developers.
Stanislav Khromov is one of the organizers of Meetup WordPress Stockholm and he feels that the group is growing rapidly.
-“When I joined Meetup WordPress Stockholm two years ago, there hadn’t been that many Meetups for a while and there were just over a hundred members. Today we are just over a thousand and after each Meetup we get a few more. The last Meetup WordPress Stockholm sold out in an hour and a half.
The problem with broadening the community is that the interests of the participants differ. When WordCamp Stockholm adds tracks for less advanced users, developers can snort at tracks where the choice of theme can keep a discussion going.
But inspiration can be found from abroad. WordCamp Toronto in August this year had four tracks, with clear themes of content marketing, business, design and developers, as well as pure beginner sessions. The conference was also held on a weekend to better suit hobbyists.
WordPress enthusiasts in all counties should join a Wordpress Meetup group or form their own group in their city. Sign up for WordCamp Stockholm on November 22-23. Discuss in Facebook groups, tweet and blog about WordPress. Forming a formal WordPress association would provide organizational strength. It’s the community that makes WordPress as a platform strong.
This is how the community can grow:
- Inspire people outside Stockholm to organize Meetups.
- Broaden Wordcamp with tracks that are interesting outside pure developer circles.
- Make passive users understand the value of contributing to the community
- Create networks between bloggers, podcasters and youtubers interested in WordPress.
- Start a formal association for WordPress promoters in Sweden.