Doc Pop’s News Drop: Yoast’s €25,000 Diversity Fund

Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.

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In this week’s News Drop we talk about Yoast SEO’s €25,000 Diversity Fund to help underrepresented speakers attend WordCamps, plus we recap some highlights from this week’s Plugin Madness competition, and check in with Jenny Beaumont for some behind the scenes info about WordCamp Europe.

Love WordPress news but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop:
Willing to put their money where their mouth is, Yoast SEO has launched a diversity fund to help increase speaker diversity at WordCamps and open source conferences around the world. YOAST, who are best known for their WordPress SEO plugin, have pledged a minimum of 25,000 euros each year as part of their Yoast Diversity Fund.
In a recent post, Joost De Valk, states that WordCamps have efforts in place to be more inclusive and diverse, but their budgets often fail to cover the travel expenses for most speakers. The Yoast Diversity Fund aims to fund up to 1,000 euros per event for travel and accomendation.
Stating further “At Yoast, we’ve been thinking about what we can do to improve the inclusivity of conferences. One of the things we can do is remove hurdles, and specifically, the hurdle of costs. Costs for speakers from a diverse background to come and speak.”
If you are interested in applying to the Yoast Diversity Fund, you send an email to diversity-fund at yoast.com. Applicants need to identify as part of an underrepresented group and needs to already have been accepted as a speaker at the conference. These conferences need to be non-commercial and related to either WordPress, Magento, or TYPO3.
It is week two of our 2018 Plugin Madness competition. Last week we weeded the tournament down from 64 to 32 plugins, and this week it’s bumped it down to just 16.
One of the biggest surprises on our side was seeing YOAST get bumped out in the second round.
Which breaks my heart considering that whole thing I just got talking about before…
WPMU Dev supporters came out in full force last week, helping secure round 3 slots for two of their WordPress plugins: Smush Image Compression and Hummingbird Page Speed Optimization. Smush, which was the winner of last year’s Plugin Madness competition, smashed ShortPixel Image Optimizer with 86% of the vote. There were 4 image compression plugins in the beginning of the tournament, and Smush is the last one to remain.
The contest is getting more and more heated, so don’t wait, go to PluginMadness.com to vote for your favorite plugins. A new round begins Monday March 26th, so get your votes in now.
WordCamp Europe is quickly approaching and each week we are lucky enough to have WordCamp Europe updates from Jenny Beaumont, the lead organizer from this year’s event. We’ll let her take it from here:
That’s it for this week’s News Drop. What are your predictions for the next few rounds of Plugin Madness? Share your bracketology in the comments below and stay tuned next week for more on WordCamp Europe, Plugin Madness, and the latest WordPress news.