Category: WordCamp

In 2015, the WordPress Foundation established an annual memorial scholarship to honor the memory of Kim Parsell, a beloved and influential contributor to the WordPress community. This scholarship ensures that Kim’s core values continue to inspire and enrich the WordPress community.

Until 2024, this scholarship was awarded each year to a female WordPress contributor who has never attended WordCamp US and would require financial assistance to do so. More information on the scholarship, including past recipients, is available here.

Following the latest WordPress Foundation Board meeting, the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship has been extended to WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Europe, in addition to WordCamp US. This expansion honors Kim’s legacy and her dedication to inclusivity and diversity within the WordPress community, making it possible for more community members to attend these inspiring events.

We’re happy to announce that this year’s scholarship recipient for WCEU is Eleni Stergatou! Lena’s dedication to WordPress translations, core, plugins, and more truly embodies the values that Kim held dear.

Meet Lena Stergatou: Advocate for Accessible and Inclusive WordPress Development

I’m Lena Stergatou, known in the WordPress community as lenasterg, and I’ve always enjoyed working with WordPress and BuddyPress. I discovered WordPress back in 2008 while searching for a platform that could support multiple sites within a single installation. That’s when I came across WordPress MU (now known as WordPress Multisite). I immediately loved how flexible and easy it was to extend and customize WordPress to meet specific needs, especially for Multisite environments.

I enjoy contributing to the WordPress community by developing new plugins, reviving broken ones, and submitting bug fixes. As a General Translation Editor for the Greek WordPress team, I help make WordPress and its plugins accessible to Greek-speaking users. I believe it’s incredibly important for WordPress, its plugins, and themes to be translated into multiple languages. Translations improve accessibility and foster inclusion by helping more people use the platform comfortably. This realization came from my own experience with my children when they were young, and with my parents, who don’t speak English. Simple prompts like “next” or “read more” were confusing for them, making it clear how crucial it is to provide tools in people’s native languages. This is why I dedicate time to translating — to ensure that everyone, regardless of their language skills, can fully enjoy and benefit from WordPress.

I try to live by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s principle: “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived — that is to have succeeded.” So whenever I detect a bug in open-source code, I do my best to fix it, add new features, and share my work with the community.

I live in Patras, Greece, with my husband, my teenage daughter, and my teenage son. Professionally, I hold a Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering and have worked as an ICT trainer and author. With over 20 years of experience as a web developer, I am currently working with the Computer Technology Institute (CTI Diophantus), where I develop web services for the Greek educational community.

---

Get in touch with Lena on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenasterg/ 

In 2015, the WordPress Foundation established an annual memorial scholarship to honor the memory of Kim Parsell, a beloved and influential contributor to the WordPress community. This scholarship ensures that Kim’s core values continue to inspire and enrich the WordPress community.

This scholarship is awarded each year to a female WordPress contributor who has never attended WordCamp US and would require financial assistance to do so. More information on the scholarship, including past recipients, is available here.

We’re happy to announce that this year’s scholarship recipient is Cynthia Norman! Cynthia’s commitment to WordPress training and education embodies the values that Kim cherished.

Cynthia joined the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program in its inaugural year as a mentee, and she credits that program with giving her the boost she needed to dig into WordPress and grow professionally. Cynthia began contributing to the WordPress Training team shortly after and hasn’t let up since!

When asked about her proudest contribution to WordPress, Cynthia points to a Learning Pathway course she developed for Learn WordPress:

I am an avid content creator with the Training Team and, so far, my proudest contribution to the WordPress open source project has been creating my first lesson for the Learning Pathway: Beginner Developer
course. Working collaboratively with WordPress educators has been so rewarding, and exactly what I needed to complement my freelance work as a WordPress developer.

If Cynthia’s name sounds familiar to you, it might be because she was recently featured in a WordPress Contributor Spotlight.

It’s also possible you’ve crossed paths with her in a WordPress Training team meeting.

You may have even stumbled across her YouTube channel full of WordPress tutorials!

To say that Cynthia keeps busy is an understatement.

When she’s not contributing to WordPress or playing with her six grandchildren, Cynthia enjoys spending her time outdoors in beautiful Ontario, Canada where she lives with her husband and her dog, Mya.