2015 Contributor Survey

Hi docs folks! Thanks for all your hard work and contributions in 2015. Could you contribute few more minutes to fill in the 2015 contributor survey? It will help us establish some baselines around the contributor experience so that we can see how things change over time.

**This is being posted to all the Make teams, so if you subscribe to a bunch of p2s and keep seeing this post, know that you only need to fill the survey in once, not once per team.**

The survey is anonymous (so you can be extra honest), all questions are optional (so you can skip any that you don’t want to answer), and we’ll post some aggregate results by the end of January. It took testers 5-10 minutes to complete on average (depends how much you have to say), so I bet you could knock it out right after you read this post! 🙂

There are two sections of the survey. The first has questions about team involvement, recognition, and event involvement, and is pretty much what you’d expect from an annual survey (which teams did you contribute to, how happy are you as a contributor, etc).

The second section is about demographics so we can take a stab at assessing how diverse our contributor base is. All questions are optional, but the more information we have the better we can figure out what we need to improve. If there’s some information you’d rather not identify, that’s okay, but please do not provide false information or use the form to make jokes — just skip those questions.

The survey will be open until January 15, 2016. Whether you have 5 minutes now, or 10 over lunch (or whenever), please take the 2015 contributor survey. Thanks!

#annual-survey, #contributors

WCSF Final Planning

If you are not attending WCSF this year, you can ignore this post. If you are coming and planning to participate as part of the docs team, please click through and read it all. 🙂

Continue reading

#wcsf, #wcsf2014

WCSF Tickets, Meetup

Anyone planning to attend WCSF this year from the docs team, please read the post at https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2014/09/08/wcsf-tickets-and-stuff/ for information about WCSF ticket sales and the contributor days following the main conference. Please click the link and read that post *before* asking questions on this thread. 🙂

If you are planning to attend the docs team meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. but I have not been in touch with you regarding hotels/travel dates, please pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me in IRC (jenmylo) or shoot me an email (same username @wordpress.org) so I can include you in the planning.

Thanks!

#docs-team-meetup, #wcsf2014

Team Meetup at WCSF (More)

Hi again! We’re working on making sure we have enough room blocks to make sure all the contributors who are coming in October can get a decent rate (or have a room provided by us if needed). Some of you replied to my post from last week and filled in the survey so I’d know you were planning to come, but some haven’t. Additionally, some people did the survey and marked themselves as team members of teams they’re not actually involved with, so I need your help! 🙂

I just want to make sure we count everyone so we can try to put you at the same hotel to make the meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. part easier (though I know most people on this team are also heavily involved in other teams, so we’ll figure that once we have a solid tally of who’s planning to come at all).

If you didn’t read the post before, the plan for the event is:
Sat/Sun — WCSF conference
Monday — community summit
Tues/Wed — team meetups (team being together to talk issues, make plans, work together, etc)

The people who identified themselves as active members of the docs team in the survey are: @jerrysarcastic, @drewapicture, @trishasalas, @topher1kenobe, @hanni, @kpdesign, @nicolealleyinteractivecom, @davidjlaietta, @jazzs3quence, @sewmyheadon, @siobhan, @otto42 (all authors on this team blog), as well as:
Cousett Hoover, Benjamin Hansen, John Blackbourn, Ed Caissie, and Russell Fair.

Is this an accurate list? @kpdesign, can you let me know if these folks are all active with the docs team, and also tell me if there’s anyone missing that you think should be there from the team? Comment here, email me, hit me in irc, whatever’s easiest.

Any docs folks not listed above who are active on the team and want to come to the team meetup should fill out the survey so I can have you on the list as we start deciding which hotels to put each team in. We’ll be spread out among 4 or 5 hotels, so I want to be sure we can keep the teams together.

And just a reminder that we have a travel assistance program this year to help contributors who don’t work for a wp-based company and can’t cover travel costs on their own. Apply for travel assistance by June 30 Applications for travel assistance are now closed. If you need help, contact @jenmylo.

Thanks!

#meetup, #wcsf2014

WCSF Details and a Request

Heads up, docs team! We’re getting ready to publish details about the plans for WordCamp San Francisco this October (which includes a mini team meetup), so if you’re thinking of attending, please read the post at https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2014/06/12/wordcamp-san-francisco-travel-contributor-days/ and take the short survey linked at the end of it so I’ll know how many team members to plan for (don’t worry, this isn’t a commitment or anything, I just need to get some rough numbers for budgeting purposes). Thanks!

#meetup, #wcsf, #wcsf2014

OSCON 2014

Cross-posting to multiple teams, so apologies if you’ve seen this on another Make site already.*

There are a few days left to submit proposals to OSCON. It would be great to see the sessions there that are about WordPress actually being presented by people involved in the project, so I’d like to encourage/urge/beg some of you to submit a proposal based on your involvement in the project and/or the cool stuff that’s happened on the team in the past year. The submission deadline is January 30, and the event itself is in Portland, OR July 20-24, 2014. To apply to speak at OSCON, go to http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014/public/cfp/308

*If you are active enough on Make that you’ve seen this post in a couple of places, that suggests to me that you are super-involved in the WordPress project and probably have some interesting stories/insights/experiences worth sharing at OSCON, so go apply! 🙂

#conferences

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

Hi all. I talked to Siobhan about including Documentation in our Gnome participation this summer. @siobhan: Head over to https://codex.wordpress.org/Gnome_Summer_Program_for_Women#Documentation and fill in project ideas and info on whoever from this team is willing/able to mentor an intern (ideally we put more than one mentor with each student). No idea yet how many student slots we’ll get. Feel free to edit the Documentation section as you see fit.

#gnome

Hello Docs folks There’s a new project set…

Hello Docs folks. There’s a new project/set of docs that I think it makes sense for this group to be responsible for, but I want to get your input and see if there are any team members with a bit of a track record of responsibility who’d like to step up and take charge of it/them (someone who’s not already responsible for another big project).

As you probably know, the content on wordpress.tv (mostly 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. videos, though starting to include other WP presentations and tutorials, all of which you are free to embed in docs) has not been captioned/transcribed. Adding captions/transcripts will make this content accessible to deaf and hard of hearing community members, will make it easier for someone to scan a video’s content, and will allow search engines to get a better index. As we introduce the ability to add caption files, these docs will need to be reviewed and managed.

Volunteers on this project should have good spelling/grammar skills so they can correct errors that captioning volunteers make, and should be willing to watch the videos on wordpress.tv to make sure the captioning volunteers did an accurate job.

The way it will work for now is that volunteers who want to contribute captions will do so on a third-party site (we’re recommending amara.org, but anything that lets you download a ttml file is fine). They’ll download the caption file (only the ttml format will work on wordpress.tv), then upload it to wordpress.tv through a form that will be available only to the vetted volunteers (at least for now).

Whoever steps up here will be a hero in the accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) effort, and will be responsible for wrangling captioning volunteers and ramping up new ones (eventually we should have some better docs and systems in place to require less hand-holding).

If anyone is interested in taking point on this, let’s hear it in the comments, and I can follow up with anyone who’s interested. We’re ready to launch this on Monday.

Note that members of the Accessibility group would participate in this effort under the aegis of the docs team, since docs is a product team, but accessibility is not. That said, someone from accessibility group who hasn’t participated in docs before also would be totally appropriate as the head volunteer.

#accessibility, #captions

Stats

Going to be working on a plan for collecting contributor stats in all areas of the project. Pretend we have no technical limitations; what stats do you think it would cool to have around documentation? Leave your ideas in the comments, and I’ll add them to the master list for discussion with the MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team.

#stats

Team Reps

Siobhan McKeown and Drew Jaynes. Congrats! The term starts with the new year, so I’ll be in touch before then to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding expectations.

Here are the voters:

Please describe your role with the docs team.

  • 4 – I am an active member of the doc team, and contributed within the last 3 months
  • 3 – I have not yet contributed to docs, but I plan to start soon
  • 1 – I do not plan to contribute to docs
  • 0 – I didn’t contribute within the past three months, but I have been a docs contributor in the past

To which documentation efforts have you contributed?

  • 7 – Codex
  • 5 – Handbooks, to teach the public (users, theme developers, etc)
  • 3 – CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Help Tabs
  • 3 – Handbooks, to teach new contributors (core contrib hb, etc)
  • 0 – Other Option

8 people voted, so not a big increase since last time, which was one reason we merged docs with forums to create the support group earlier this year. Of note, Siobhan received enough votes in the support team vote to be a rep there as well, despite focusing on docs. The group vs project divisions are coming up in a few other areas as well, so when June rolls around, we may want to look at rearranging some of our groups based on activity and areas of focus. For now, though, docs remains separate.

#team-rep