Meeting Summary for February 13, 2014

Full meeting transcript: https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-getinvolved&day=2014-02-13&sort=asc#m9841

This week’s focus was mentorship and diversity programs. Bolded subjects link to the point in the chat transcript when we started talking about it.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Our application has been submitted. I posted the questionnaire portion on this blog for anyone who’s interested. We’ll find out if we are accepted as a mentoring organization on February 24.

GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Deadline to apply is this Friday. We discussed the pros/cons of participating and agreed that for this summer it would be better to focus on developing our in-house mentorship program, and think about doing OPW again later on when we have more structure in place to help ensure successful internships.

In-house Mentorship Program. Jen to contact each contributor group about developing a 1-month/3-month pilot per the post about it. For this team, we’ll try pilotsaround meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. organizing, WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizing, and WordPress.tv. Jen and Andrea will work out the volunteers and will set up a meeting next week to discuss the content with those volunteers. @andymci will be one of the first meetup mentorsEvent Supporter Event Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues.. @STDestiny reminded us of the work done last year around a WC mentorship program. (We need to find you a new username that doesn’t make people think of STDs.)

Speaker Diversity at WordPress Events. @jillbinder gave a briefing on the brainstorming/practice workshop for women interested in becoming speakers they’re doing in Vancouver in March. Andrea and I committed to doing one in Portland, and are reaching out to a couple of other local communitios about doing them as well as a pilot. If successful, we can write up a curriculum for it and post it for meetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. and other groups to use to increase speaker diversity in their areas. (Note: this would not be limited to women) 

Sponsoring Third-party Events. Automattic is sponsoring the diversity mixer at Philly Tech Week for WordPress. @liljimmie is one of the organizers. We’re looking at the Philly Ladyhacks event also. Anyone with events by other groups that help underrepresented groups get started with tech (especially/specifically WordPress), let Jen know. Likewise if there are third-party groups e should consider partnering with on outreach or educational programs. Will make a form or something for submitting suggestions, and will try to have a point person to act as the liaison with each group we decide to work with. 

Girl Develop IT/Training. @liljimmie summarized the work she’s done around WP tracks with GDI Philly, and we talked about how we could standardize with modules for wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ training (which had staled again, but Tracy picked up the child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. module again and it’s looking good). She hopes to standardize her WP training content across GDI. As we develop more training on wordpress.org, we’ll be able to hare more. Jen offered to make connections as needed to help Tracy with a more advanced WP programming track for GDI. Tracy will be wrapping up the child theme module for wordpress.org and will then look at the forat to extend to other modules for our theme school project. @sabreuse will take another stab at updating the troubleshooting curriculum from our pilot workshops a year ago so we can finally get that posted and distributed. 

Next Week’s meeting will focus on WordCamps.

#meeting-notes