Meetup Roundup

Brought to the discussion … a lot of things!

IRC

Representation
Representation is a weird issue. Being a rep does not mean you’re the most active person in all aspects of Support. It means you’re taking notes in meetings (hi), keeping track of other groups, reporting back here with things we need to know, and reporting out there what they need to know. That said, IRC is a lost child.

Unlike the forums, we can’t (easily) add people as OP (Operators, it’s equivalent to forum admins) in IRC as @photomatt holds the keys, and having him add random people would be bad. But we do need a way to appoint people to help bring issues in IRC that the rep needs to know about back to the masses. As a mid-way point, the current proposal is as follows!

Regular contributors who are active and helpful in #wordpress will be recognized as ‘Moderators’ or ‘IRC Rockstars’ and expected to :

1) try and attend #wordpress-sfd meetups and report on the goings on
2) follow this blog (and make/docs)
3) post to make/support as needed for issues (such as hacks, wp bugs, issues with other irc groups as they come up to ‘pass information up the chain’)

The proposed Rockstars are: @zogot @clorith @pixolin @tw2113 @kenshino @john-c and @angela

If you were nominated, please leave a comment saying if you accept or not so I can add you here as an editor 🙂 I need the reply so I can get your email and add you here. It’s totally okay to say ‘no thanks’ and saying yes does NOT mean you get OP access to #wordpress, just that you get a fancy invisible title 🙂 You will not be expected to do weekly reports to make/updates, just be active and report upstream.

It’s important to note: The is exactly the same responsibilities that support forumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. admins and mods are expected to have. Not being listed doesn’t mean you’re not awesome. Remember, there are some expectations with the ‘job’. If you’re interested and think you’d do a good job and can fulfill those expectations, leave a comment 🙂

Based on how this works out, I’ll try and buttonhole @photomatt about how to handle OPs, since IRC doesn’t have ‘mods’ or titles, which really would work well too. (Part of why we need some more OPs is to handle stuff like bot attacks, flooding, etc).

Doc Bot

When it needs updates or changes and stuff, it’s hard to track. Per @pixolin’s suggestions, and considering workflows, we’ve made : https://make.wordpress.org/support/irc-doc-bot/

You can follow that page via IRC, and @sivel can mark off things as done. The P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. powers means starting a line with ‘o’ makes it a checkbox.

IRC Support Docs

Going forward, the Support Handbook will get more pages added to it specifically about IRC and how to handle things and so on. I’ll start reaching out to folks about that, but volunteers welcome! I’m not super IRC skilled, so I will need help!

The IRC Rockstars will be listed on those pages, for ‘official’ reckoning.

Next Support Rep

Everyone seems okay with @JDembowski (who didn’t say ‘no’ 😉 ) so we’ll be doing that. I will still be around as a Forum Rockstar and still in IRC, so this isn’t like I’m LEAVING, it’s just stepping back from one responsibility: reporting. I’ll be Jan’s backup/sidekick/mentor after all 🙂

Behavior

Remember you represent WordPress when you step up to answer anyone’s question. Don’t be mean, don’t accuse people, and remember you don’t have to answer every question. If someone’s behaving badly in the forums, use the ‘modlook’ tag and walk away. If you need help, use the wp-forums email list and just ask someone to take a look. (IRC folks, you can use this too!)

Conjoined Twins: Docs and Support

Initially, @siobhan and I were all gung-ho about merging teams. We were wrong. Right now we’re working on a proposal that will be posted either here or on make/updates about how the teams will work. But we’re going to keep our separate reps and p2s. Do expect that there will remain a lot of crossover between the teams. We’re like virtual co-teams.

Chat times will not be changing at this point, so Support and Docs will remain Thursdays at 1600 UTC. If it remains this busy (and really this week was BUSY), we may split times when @JDembowski takes over based on his availability.

Whew. Can I nap now?

#irc, #meetup, #recap