Team Chat Agenda Mentorship Diversity May 8 2014…

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 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.. Not too much for us to do right now other than make sure everyone is doing that. @iandunn started playing with embeddable open sourceOpen 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 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. 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 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. 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 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, 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 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.. 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 conductCode 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 CoCCode 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 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

Reusing WordCamp lanyards: our badge of honor, or a pain in the neck?

Currently, WordCamp CentralWordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each. provides lanyards to all WordCamps in the US and Canada who need them, then asks the organizing team to collect the lanyards at the end of 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. and ship them to the next, closest WordCamp on the schedule.

This helps reduce the amount of waste that WordCamps create, which of course minimizes our combined carbon footprint, and makes us all very proud. Unfortunately, this project has faced a few challenges:

  • WordCamp organizers often forget to collect lanyards after the event; it’s frequently the last thing they think about on the “day of.”
  • WordCamp organizers often collect some lanyards, but not very many – best retention is 60%, tops.
  • Shipping lanyards from WordCamp to WordCamp cancels out some of the carbon footprint reduction.
  • Some people think it’s yucky to use a lanyard someone else has already used.
  • This program never grew past the US and Canada, because shipping between WordCamps internationally is really expensive.

So where do we go from here? I’d like to keep providing lanyards to WordCamps, if people agree that’s valuable.

Option A is to buy WordCamps recycled PET lanyards — branded with the WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org.’s logo — in quantities high enough to get us a stellar deal. We could ship out these lanyards in the same package as WordPress swag (buttons, stickers). One advantage here would be that we could then provide lanyards to WordCamps outside the US and Canada, yay! The “yuck factor” would be neutralized, but we could not say that we were in any way reducing the amount of waste created by WordCamps.

Option B is to redouble our efforts to reuse lanyards at WordCamps, and all agree to do better at collecting them at the end of the event. This also doesn’t address the “yuck” factor, but it does reduce the number of lanyards that the WordCamp program generates. This also doesn’t address the issue of non-US and Canada events missing out on this benefit.

Do you have a preferred option, or can you suggest an Option C, D, or E to help us efficiently reduce WordCamp waste? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

#global, #wordcamp, #wordcamps

Team Rep Change

@andrea_r is going to be stepping back from volunteering for a while for personal reasons, so @sabreuse has graciously volunteered to fill her shoes re community outreach team. We’re overdue for a take-stock-make-plans as a number of projects that were parceled out over the past couple of months didn’t wind up going anywhere, and I’ve not been very wrangly in public. Will start being more official and consistent with posts about what’s up. In the meantime, welcome, Amy!

#community-management, #team-reps

Summer Mentorship Programs: GSoC and Gnome Outreach Program for Women

GSoC

I submitted the WordPress application to participate in GSoC on March 29th, the deadline for applying. The mobile team helpfully added a bunch of project ideas, but coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team has been so focused on 3.6 that that area hasn’t gotten much attention, so I don’t know if we’ll be accepted or not. I left in the (not yet done) ideas and 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. from a past year so that we wouldn’t look empty, but I would have liked more new projects to get in there. Will be trying to get some core peeps to help round it out today at WC Miami, and will shoot Carol at GSoC an email to let her know we’ve added more stuff (since they finished reviewing applications yesterday, and are announcing accepted orgs on Monday).

If we are accepted I’ll be looking for 2 people to project manage the program for the season. Will talk to a couple of likely people at WC Miami about that today as well.

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

I applied for WordPress to be a mentoring organization for the Gnome program, and we have been accepted. Some good things and some less than good things about this one.

Good Things:

  • Not limited to just code. We could take on interns in design, support, translation, documentation, community management, you name it. And code, of course. Much more leeway in the effort to grow the ranks of women project contributors. How awesome would it be for a budding/potential support team member to be officially mentored by @ipstenu or @andrea_r? To have a design intern that could help with all the Make site stuff? To have a pm or org management type get involved with the day to day minutiae of managing our contributor community, much of which goes undone because I and many other people all run out of time for lower-priority administrative tasks? To do pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party reviews? To work on some of the international things suggested by Cátia and Zé? Helping with WC and 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. approvals? We have so many community jobs that don’t get the same level of attention as core contribution, and this would really put a spotlight on some of those areas.
  • It’s a small program, communication has been very easy and low-stress so far, and the women overseeing it are readily accessible.
  • Students get a stipend of around 5k for the summer, so they can work full-time on the projects.

Less Good Things (well, not less good, but less easy):

  • Unlike GSoC, which is funded by Google so all we have to contribute is our time as mentors and admins, the Gnome program will require us to fundraise in order to cover costs. We need to cover at least one intern, and from there it seems to depend on how the general fundraising goes. Basically thinking now’s the time to start a fundraising effort aimed squarely at growing contributor diversity, to cover Gnome program, trainings, etc.
  • We don’t have a list from a previous year of undone things that we can swipe. Well, we do and we don’t. Code projects can be swiped from there, but we need to come up with a list of mentors and project ideas for the non-code stuff tout de suite. Will try to get some people together at WC Miami to help with this also, but comments on this post from anyone with a project idea and/or willing to be a potential mentorEvent 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. for the summer would be great.

Anyway, on Monday we’ll know about GSoC, so we can make an announcement about both programs together. Will also be announcing some plans for WordPress’s 10th anniversary early this coming week.

#gnome, #gsoc, #interns

We need to set up a weekly irc…

We need to set up a weekly irc chat like other teams so that we don’t accidentally go more than a week without checking in on progress and stuff (oops). @andrea_r and @sabreuse: You are already involved in other weekly chats/meetings, so is there a day of the week that is easier for you guys?

#team-chat

#wordpress-contribute

The official IRC channel for the welcome wagon is now live on freenode. Per @andrea_r‘s earlier post, this channel should be staffed 24/7 with at least one person able to point potential/new contributors in the right direction. My guess is that it won’t be very busy (at least at first), so it’ll be mostly a matter of idling and just responding when someone comes in. With contributors all over the world (making it nearly impossible to schedule real-time chats) I’m thinking that it shouldn’t be too hard to get volunteers. It’ll be Andrea’s job to decide on the volunteer schedule, but I’d recommend making it a weekly one that repeats for the sake of ease, and letting people swap shifts as needed.

Anyway, the channel is live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-contribute. Once we get the coverage squared away we can start publicizing it and work it into documentation, make sites, etc.

#irc, #welcome-wagon

Suggesting, Volunteering, and Making a Process Here

As @andrea_r posted, we had a chat about possibilities for this group. She’s going to head up the Welcome Wagon project, and posted some of the things we discussed there. In addition to suggestions about things that could be done, though, we need volunteers. It’s a given that there are a million great ideas that would improve the project and the experience of contributing to it.

What’s not a given is that there are enough hours in the day for a handful of people (many of whom are volunteers with day jobs, families, and other responsibilities to juggle) to make all these things happen — especially since most things are not as trivial to implement as most people assume. In reality, most suggestions that come in have been made before, have been discussed, and are either waiting on implementation because of a lack of warm bodies to do the work, or have been rejected for some reason.

We have traditionally sucked at making suggestion follow-up transparent, and need to do better (that’s part of the hope with team reps). That said, the handful of people who get suggestions and requests lobbed at them 24/7 aren’t servants, and shouldn’t be treated as such.

To that end, when commenting with a suggestion, I’ll ask that commenters on this blog follow the same rule I used to use for the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team scoping posts: if you make a suggestion, include whether or not you are willing to help with the work to make it a reality if the suggestion is accepted, and if so, indicate how much time you have to give to the project.

So moving forward, try not to say, “I think think it would be great if you did [idea],” but instead say, “I think it would be great if we did [idea]. I [describe the skills you have that you can use to make this idea happen] and I can give about [say how much time you can give to working on this project].” It’s also okay to make a suggestion you’re not willing to help with (or don’t have the skills for), but you should still give this information.

Examples of what not to say:

You should have a prancing unicorn on every make site to welcome people, like a modern-day Clippy.

Make the Showcase better, it’s lame.

You should make it so profiles show all the activity people have at community events.

Examples what would be better:

We should have a prancing unicorn on every make site to welcome people, like a modern-day Clippy. I’m willing to help with this, and have the necessary JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/./CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. skills. I could throw about 20 hours at this over the next couple of weekends.

The Showcase would be better if someone weeded out the sites that have changed and aren’t Showcase-worthy anymore. I’m not a coder, but I could contribute an hour or two a week to moderating this if someone else made a form or something so people could report sites that should be removed.

It would be great if 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/ profiles showed 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. and 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. activity. I don’t want to be involved in the project to make this happen, just wanted to make a suggestion.

This will help us move forward faster, and create more actionable comments since they’ll have more context. Thanks!

#process