Updated after the talk, see the update and video, the transcript and the slides below.
Original post 4 May 2026
On 9 May 2026, I’m going to give a lightning talk at WordCamp Torino.
Title: A Torinese woman inspiring Community journeys
Here is the description:
A personal story designed to inspire others through mentorship, belonging, and the way community leadership spreads.
It tells the story of how a Torinese woman inspired everything I did in the WordPress community, and how that same inspiration can help others too.
From Italy to Switzerland, this talk shares how one person’s approach to community building can encourage others to step forward and get involved. It follows a journey shaped by mentorship, trust, and a strong sense of belonging, and shows how these values helped grow and strengthen local WordPress communities.
Beyond WordPress, the talk explores how the same open-source principles can inspire action in many other contexts, from local non-profits and youth sports or art clubs to broader forms of civic initiatives and participatory democracy. It is an invitation to see community leadership as something accessible, human, and transferable, and to imagine how shared responsibility and collaboration can help build a better world together.
After the talk, you’ll find here the slides and text, as well as all the relevant links and maybe additional information.
See you there or stay tuned!
Update, after the talk
You can see my lightning talk on the WordPress Community Italia Youtube channel, starting at 3:13:36
Transcript
(including some links in context)
MC: Ultìma talk della mattinata, this is the last talk of the day, of the morning, not the day, we have a lot, a lot of more talks, but this is special because this italk will be held in English, so we’ll test our…, no?
Me: Sì, non vado parlare in italiano
MC: She could… she’s also able to talk in Italian, but perfetto, we are more international today, so I introduce to you a person that is very active in the WordPress International community and also in Interaction.Site if you want to visit, a big applause to Patricia BT
Me: Grazie
A Torinese woman inspiring community journeys.
Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 3
I want to share a very personal story.
When I started contributing to WordPress, I wasn’t confident I could build something, or be a leader in the community. I liked the project, I liked the people but I didn’t see myself as leading or organising.
Slide 4
This talk is about how one person can change a whole community, even in other countries.
Slide 5
And that person for me:
is Francesca Marano. And Francesca is in the room today!
Slides
So in 2014 and 2015, Switzerland hosted two WordCamps in Zurich.
Then I became the lead organiser for the 2016 WordCamp Switzerland, that was that year took place in Geneva.
As you may know, every WordCamp lead organiser is matched with a mentor, also called now an event supporter.
A WordCamp mentor is an experienced organiser and knows about planning and is there to support you, you can ask your questions and honestly, sometimes keeps you sane.
My mentor was Francesca Marano, 2016.
She wasn’t only mentoring me. She was mentoring 3 lead organisers at the same time. And I remember our calls with Takis Bouyouris for WordCamp Athens and Stanislas Khromov for WordCamp Stockholm. I remember our calls, the four of us.
From our first calls, I could feel how deeply she cared about community building, not only task , but people.
Francesca was replying to all our questions, and she reminded us that behind volunteers there are real lives, family commitments, and tired evenings. So what I learned at that time, it was “Be kind first, so people in your team can show up.”
And today it’s my turn to be a WordCamp mentor, event supporter for others, and I try to be as good as Francesca was for me. It means empowering the person you are mentoring, not micro-manage.
Slide 7
In June 2016, I attended WordCamp Europe in Vienna.
Two sessions there made me cry.
I wasn’t expecting to cry at a technology conference. But suddenly I realised I was part of something bigger than just plugins and tools,websites . I was part, I felt connected to thousands of people I didn’t even know yet.
The first talk that made me cry was Mike Little sharing a co‑founder’s perspective of the early days of WordPress.
The second was Francesca’s talk:
“The rebirth of the Italian community.” (Youtube)
She spoke about growing local meetups in Italy, finding translators for the polyglots team (the Italian polyglots team), how you can contribute when you are not a developer, about organising WordCamp Torino, about organising a Contributor day in Milano, and building trust and energy.
Listening to her, something clicked for me.
I thought:
This is what I want to do in Switzerland. This is the kind of community I want to help create. And to be honest, she also inspired me to continue the WCEU picnic, because that year, she organised that picnic with Naoko Takano, a member of the Japanese community, just before WC in Vienna, and if you attend WordCamp Europe in Krakow next month, you can attend the picnic I organise there.
Slide 8
Still in 2016, after that talk, I decided to attend a local WordCamp in Italy.
It was WordCamp Milano in October. So I went to Milano in October and something almost unreal happened the evening before the WordCamp. In Milano, huge city, I simply bumped by chance, in the streets of Milano into Francesca. She was with Siobhan McKeown, with whom she still runs projects today, such as WPIncludes. They invited me to join a dinner they were having that evening, Osso Buco and it was amazing. At that table were people from Yoast, people I already knew from the Swiss agency called required, an Automattician and other people.
And it was great, because it made me feel welcome. Not as a visitor, but as someone who belonged.
That feeling changed everything for me. Because once you feel you belong somewhere, you don’t just attend. You start to contribute. You support others. You start wanting to offer the same welcome to newcomers.
Slide 9
Still at WordCamp Milano 2016, Francesca helped me, live during the event, to find additional sponsors for the upcoming WordCamp in Geneva.
She built bridges. She help things to connect, and she did it quietly, efficiently, and without ego. I loved that.
Afteor that, I kept coming back to Italy whenever I could:
Milano. Torino (la più bella città del mondo). More recently Verona, Roma, and Pisa. Each time, I felt the same atmosphere of openness and collaboration. Each of those events strengthened my sense that community is grown one person at a time, and one person empowers the next, you know. Every year people show up and welcome newcomers, and it builds and strengthened a community.
Slide 10
WordPress is software. But software is not enough, you need human relationships, you know
And contributors, especially the contributors who do it for free, they need more than just tools. They need: A sense of belonging. Safe spaces to connect. Recognition. And a sense that what they do matters.
Open source does not survive on code alone. It survives on human relationships.
For me, community also means knowing that when I walk into a WordCamp anywhere in Europe, I’m not alone. I always recognise faces. I always find someone to have coffee with. And I know I belong there.
This understanding started for me with Francesca. And in Italy many others followed, people like Laura Sacco, Francesco Di Candia, and many more among you. And btw, Francesco is my current mentor for the upcoming WordCamp in Swizerland
Seeing people like Laura and Francesco and others taking that same energy forward made me realise that
Community leadership spreads. One person empowers the next.
Today, I am honoured to count some of them among my friends.
WordPress gave me software knowledge, yes. But above all, it brought these people into my life.
Slide 11
Back in 2016, we didn’t know what the future held.
We didn’t know that:
- WordCamp Europe would be in Torino in 2024.
- WordCamp Europe would be in Switzerland in 2025. So that’s two communities on a similar journey.
And Both shaped by people who believed that community is built person by person. This is true for open source communities, but it’s also true for businesses, this also shaped my role as a community leader in my business: Interaction.Site.
Slide 12
I also realised that this way of building communities can go far beyond open source or business.
It can inspire local non-profits, grassroots initiatives, and all the spaces where children are coached, listened to, and valued, where they can learn cooperation early in life, like sports fields, art rooms, and all those places where you can value and empower.
Slide 13
And it can also inspire new ways of thinking about participatory democracy, and governance beyond WordPress. Such as politics shaped by participatory democracy, openness, and collective responsibility. We have examples. So everyone has a voice, this is important that everyone has a voice. We have examples like Barcelona’s Decidim platform or the crowdsourced constitution in Iceland, or if you know how the Swiss politics work, with constant votes/initiatives and referendums, we already have real examples.
They show that open-source values are not only technical. But they are values to we could create a better world with those values.
If we can build open, caring communities here, we can do it elsewhere too
Slide 14
So this is my thank‑you.
Thank you, Francesca, for showing me what community leadership is.
And thank you to everyone who keeps showing up, organising, mentoring, welcoming newcomers, and building these spaces.
Because WordPress is more than a tool.
It is a community built one connection at a time. But it is also an inspiration.
And it started for me with one connection 10 years ago: Francesca!
Grazie
Slide 15
Slide 16
Francesca took the mic during the Q&A and told me:
Well, I can say that you inspire me to come back to contribute to WordPress now, because I haven’t been active for a few years, so now it’s your turn to inspire others. Thank you!
Me: full circle
Leave a Reply