Team Chat Agenda (Mentorship, Diversity) — May 8, 2014
- GSoC. We’re in the community bonding period, and the students are working out revised scope plans with their mentors 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.. Not too much for us to do right now other than make sure everyone is doing that. @iandunn started playing with embeddable open source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. spreadsheets that we could use on the make sites and WordCamp 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. sites instead of google docs, but he got pulled onto higher-priority stuff. If there’s anyone that would like to help get this tool into working shape so we can try it out, a spreadsheet to track GSoC student progress/deliverables would be a great test project for it. If anyone is interested, shout out here or in the meeting.
- In house mentorship programs. Virtually no progress, but it’s been a shifty couple of weeks in terms of volunteer availability and other programs have been moving forward, so want to get this moving, but some of the more structured projects are a little easier to get people to commit to. Would especially like to get the meetup 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. one back in gear in Andy’s absence, since we’re starting to get a bunch of new groups.IF anyone wants to volunteer to help coordinate that, let me know.
- Training curricula. Not much progress since the training-specific meeting last Tuesday.
- Child Themes. Have talked with @liljimmi and I’m making up some sample exercises and quiz for her child 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, she’ll work on adding some additional info to the script it, and then we’ll pilot test in a couple of cities to see how it works, and revise as needed. I’ll do one in Portland, would like to get another 2-4 cities to try out the child themes workshop curriculum via their meetup groups. If anyone’s up for volunteering to do this sometime within the next month, pipe up. Tracy, WC Milwaukee is doing a day of theme workshops, you could see if they have a prepared curriculum to share.
- Becoming a WP Speaker. We need to reconvene the folks from all 3 pilot cities and decide what should be in the official curriculum since all 3 had slightly different content and format, and for each official curriculum we need to have one tested thing. Action item: set up a chat with Morgan, Jill, etc for sometime in the coming week.
- Other areas. There are so many workshops being conducted around the world via meetup groups. Since Tracy/Courtney have been focused on themes specifically, is there anyone who’d like to volunteer to start reaching out and/or collecting curriculums from those groups so we can see what it out there already?
- Summer camp. Started working with Zac Gordon on a curriculum for a 5-day summer day camp for high school kids based on his work teaching WordPress and web design to high school students. Will be looking for volunteers to help coordinate pilots in a variety of cities, mentors/teachers/speakers both on location and remote to help teach and review work (and provide inspiration — look, you could have an awesome career like this!). Coordinators will preferably have a connection to an area high school/teacher that can feed the right students (attitude, experience, etc) into the pilot. If interested, you know what to do.
- Setting up calls/chats with a handful of the organizations we identified as potential groups we could partner with.Will report on outcomes next week.
- Diversity mixers at meetups 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.. I want us to create a how-to for this and start having meetups do them, but want to wait until Tracy is back before we jump into that as it’s her wheelhouse and she has the most experience to draw on (ex. Philly Tech Week).
- FLOSS contributor survey. I’m working on behalf of WordPress with OSU Open Source Labs, Python, and a couple of other open source folks on putting together an academic-level survey of open source contributors so we can try to get some better stats on involvement and diversity than the anemic surveys that have been done to date. We’re planning to launch an IRB-approved survey before the end of summer, and run it annually. In another week or two we’ll start fundraising to cover a grad student’s time, some OSU oversight costs, and the like. We’re going to host the website for it, and as soon as I get the final decision on the domain we’re going to use (hopefully today) I’ll start setting up the site. I would love to have some design and theme help on that if anyone has time in the next couple of days.
- Community expectations/code of conduct “A code of conduct is a set of rules outlining the norms, rules, and responsibilities or proper practices of an individual party.” - Wikipedia. Based on the issues we’ve discussed in the past, I think that we should abandon the 2-pages-down-to-50-words-or-less conundrum for a community expectations document. Instead, let’s review the Code of Conduct that is on WordCamp.org, and revise as needed so it can govern all the official spaces. Then we can do as Matt suggested and make our Community Expectations a succinct statement about respect (and stuff) and link to the code of conduct for detail. Note: the expectation here would be that WordCamps would not then edit the CoC “A code of conduct is a set of rules outlining the norms, rules, and responsibilities or proper practices of an individual party.” - Wikipedia to suit them, but if there were issues they thought weren’t addressed, they would contribute suggested wording back to the overarching document, so that we have one policy to govern all our spaces.
That’s what I’ve got. If you want to add anything related to mentorship/diversity to the agenda, please comment on this thread before the meeting. If you have stuff you want to talk about, you can help the meeting go more quickly by pre-typing the stuff you know you want to say. Thanks!
#agenda
