Call for Contributor Stories – Share What You’ve Learned From Contributing to WordPress

Have you learned something from contributing to WordPress that could help someone else?

• Maybe you found your way into a contributor team and discovered something you didn’t expect.
• Maybe your first contribution didn’t go quite as planned.
• Maybe you learned a better way to collaborate, solve a problem, ask for help, or make your effort more meaningful.
• Or maybe you simply have a small experience that you wish someone had shared with you when you were starting out.

We want to hear about it.

Your Experience Could Help Another Contributor

Contributing to WordPress is a continuous learning experience. We learn from documentation, discussions, pull requests, meetings, reviews, collaboration, and perhaps most importantly from the experiences of other contributors.

That’s what we’re hoping to capture with the WordCamp Asia 2027 Contributor Stories.

We are looking for experiences that contain something useful, interesting, or unexpected that could help someone start, continue, or find their way in WordPress contribution. It doesn’t have to be a major milestone, a massive core patch, or a story about a significant project. And it doesn’t have to be perfectly written.

We’re interested in what you learned along the way.

What Have You Learned From Contributing?

Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

• A lesson you learned the hard way. Did something not go as expected? What did the experience teach you?
• A better way of doing something. Did you discover a workflow, tool, habit, or approach that made contributing easier?
• Your first contribution. What surprised you when you started contributing? What do you wish you’d known earlier?
• Working with others. Did collaborating with contributors from different backgrounds teach you something?
• Something people don’t usually talk about. Is there an aspect of contributing that you discovered through experience rather than documentation?
• A change in perspective. Did contributing change the way you think about WordPress, open source, or community?
• Advice for someone following a similar path. What would you tell another contributor who is about to face the same situation?

You Don’t Need to Write an Article

This is important: We are not asking you to submit a finished story.

Instead, we’d like to learn about your experience first. Tell us what happened, what you learned, and what you think others might find useful. A few paragraphs or even bullet points are enough.

We’ll use your submission as a starting point for a conversation. From there, we may follow up with questions, arrange a short interview, or explore a particular part of your experience in more detail.

You bring the raw experience. We’ll work with you to uncover the story.

We expect to develop a small number of selected stories. Not every submission will become a part of a published article, but every submission will help us understand the experiences and questions contributors are facing.

What Makes a Great Contributor Story?

We’re especially interested in stories where there’s a practical takeaway beyond the event itself:

A Starting Point	A Great Reader-Focused Story
“I joined a contributor team.”	“Here’s what surprised me when I joined a contributor team, and what I learned about finding where I could contribute effectively.”
“I had my first contribution reviewed.”	“Here’s what I learned from my first review and what I would tell someone preparing their first contribution.”

Think less about telling us everything you’ve done, and more about sharing something you’ve discovered.

We Want to Discover New Perspectives

We especially want to discover voices and perspectives that have not already been widely featured through previous Contributor Stories, HeroPress, or similar community channels. Being featured before does not automatically exclude you; if you have a genuinely different lesson or experience to share, please submit it.

Know Someone We Should Talk To?

Some of the most useful contributor experiences may come from people who would never submit their own story. You can also use the form to recommend another contributor whose experience or perspective you think others could learn from.

What Will the Finished Stories Look Like?

Each story will have a clear editorial angle and a title that tells readers what value is inside:

• Instead of “Meet Jane, a WordPress Contributor” → We might publish “What Jane Learned From Her First WordPress Contribution”
• Instead of “My Journey as a WordPress Contributor” → We might explore “What I Wish I Knew Before Joining a WordPress Contributor Team”
• Instead of “My Experience Contributing to WordPress” → We might explore “How Asking for Help Changed the Way I Contribute to WordPress”

The contributor remains at the heart of the story, but the reason we tell the story is to give something valuable back to the reader.

Ready to Share?

You don’t need a polished story.

You don’t need a long list of accomplishments.

Just tell us about an experience that taught you something. It might become a story that helps someone else take their next step in contributing to WordPress.