WordPress Brasil Meetup Online #2: WordCamp Europe 2026 Special

On 27 June 2026 we had the second WordPress Brasil Meetup Online, which was focused on bringing together people from the Brazilian and Portuguese communities who went to WordCamp Europe 2026 to share a little bit about their experience.

The idea came up before WCEU, and during the event I talked with some people about it and everyone liked the idea, so I scheduled the meetup when I got back. Since Brazil is 5 hours behind Portugal’s timezone, I scheduled the event for a Saturday morning (Brazil time), to make sure people from Portugal could more easily join. But this brought different challenges, because some of the people I talked to already had appointments that day, and others could only join for a short while. My time organizing meetups in Curitiba has taught me that there’s never a perfect date and time. The most important thing is to hold the event consistently, so I didn’t worry too much about it.

As with the first edition, the meeting was not recorded and there were no slides, the goal was to have an open conversation between the participants. There was an average of 10 people on the call, with some people joining and leaving for different reasons, and almost everyone joined the conversation.

At the beginning, each person gave a brief introduction of who they are and where they live, and then I asked each person who was at WCEU to share a little bit about how the event was and what they did (we had a contributor day table lead, a speaker, an organizer, a volunteer, and attendees). This way it was possible to see different perspectives and learn more about the different roles.

One topic that we discussed is what lessons learned can be shared between the communities from each of the three countries (we had people from Brazil, Portugal and Spain), since WordCamp Europe is organized very differently than local events and most of the learnings don’t transfer. Here are some of them:

1. Have a shared Google Drive account for the events, where each team has its own folder. That way, for each new edition of the event, we could copy the files from the previous one and start working using them as a base.
   • This also helps with things like the list of sponsors and their contact details, including sharing them between bigger events (WordCamps) and smaller ones (meetups).
2. A password manager (like 1Password) can be used to share access across multiple people.
3. In Brazil we’re doing monthly online meetups between people who are (or want to) help improve the community, including local event organizers. It happens during the week, at the end of the day, and is only 30min long to keep the discussion focused and let everyone still enjoy the rest of the day. This idea came up during WordCamp Brasil 2025’s Contributor Day, as a way to discuss more often what could be done to improve our community and share insights across different cities. Maybe Portugal will try something similar now.
4. Portugal shared how they renamed Contributor Day to Community and Contribution Day at WordCamp Portugal, and also added talks during the day, to make it more interesting for people who expect a talk every day and to make the name more inviting for people who misunderstand what Contributor Day is. That day, the talks weren’t recorded, to create a more engaging and open conversation.
5. We also discussed the following ideas about the Contributor Day:
   • Split specific topics into two groups, one more for discussion (where it’s easier for new people to join) and another focused on working (or getting things done).
   • Have only talks related to community that day, so the whole day gravitates around this topic.
   • Do something like the CloudFest Hackathon, which is more focused on an output, with projects and people selected before the event.
   • Have different formats, since one doesn’t exclude the other.
6. Always experiment with different things, something that works for a city (or country) doesn’t always work for another. Try different event formats, days of the week, spaces, … so you can see what works best. Sometimes there’s no real pattern to follow, but it’s important to maintain consistency.

At the end of the event, one thing was certain: we should keep sharing knowledge between different countries, since we can all learn a lot from each other. So we want to try to have more of this kind of meeting. I learned a lot, and had a lot of fun too! Thanks to Fellyph Cintra, Fábio Nunes, Rúben Martins, Nilo Velez, Christian van’t Hof, Gilberto Tavares, Marco Medeiros Filho, Ramon Ahnert and everyone else who joined and actively participated in the conversation. I hope to see some of you again at one of our next meetings!