2015 Contributor Survey

Hi support 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 Team 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 support team, please click through and read it all. 🙂

Continue reading

#wcsf, #wcsf2014

WCSF Tickets, Support Meetup

Anyone planning to attend WCSF this year from the support 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 support 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!

#support-team-meetup, #wcsf2014

WCSF/Team Meetup

Howdy again, folks. 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. I just want to make sure we count everyone. For example, @jdembowski, @podz, @clorith, and @jerrysarcastic didn’t fill in the survey. Maybe you guys don’t plan to attend due to timing conflicts or other reasons, or maybe you do but didn’t fill in the survey. Help me help you! 🙂

Hit the survey if you are an active member of this team so we can count you and see if you’d be able to stay for the whole time etc while we are creating room blocks. If you are not going to attend at all, please leave a comment on this post saying that and I won’t bug you anymore. If you would come but are concerned about the cost, hit the survey to be counted, and then go fill in the application for travel assistance. We have a budget for this, so let’s not allow money to prevent active contributors from attending.

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

#team-meetup, #wcsf2014

WCSF 2014 Update

Heads up, support 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!

#team-meetup, #wcsf, #wcsf2014

WP-Forums

I saw Jan’s mention of the wp-forums list in the weekly update, and as I’m on the list I’ve paid attention to how it’s used, both as a call for a gut-check/backup, and as a bit of a place to vent. As one subscriber mentioned recently, the list is not just moderators, and anyone can join, and all of it’s archived. So what feels like it’s more private than this blog maybe isn’t really. Any time I see language there that’s a little more insulting or dismissive (generally about bozos/bad actors in the forums) than is really comfortable/appropriate for something being publicly archived I cringe a little bit.

There are 331 subscribers to the wp-forums list, and there are 259 subscribers to this blog. Given that the mailing list is publicly archived, but in a way that makes it a pain to look things up and has no connection to this site, I wonder if it might be time to transition away from the list to something that actually gives you the privacy-among-moderators you desire when something more sensitive needs to be discussed and keeps the discussion in one main place?

What we do over on the make/systems blog has kind of the same compromise. We post most things publicly, but when there’s something sensitive, we post it as Private so that only people with x role on the blog can see it. Maybe that would be a good alternative? Just wanted to throw it out there as an option.

#mailing-list, #wp-forums

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 issues you’ve tackled on the team in the past year.

Almost everyone there has heard of WordPress, and many OSCON attendees use it for personal sites, but the way it gets talked about by the people giving WP-centric presentations, you’d think we were still the little blogging tool that could from 2003. It would be awesome if this year we could change that impression of the software and the project.

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, #oscon, #outreach

Howdy support folks I was just talking to…

Howdy support folks! I was just talking to @coffee2code about .org profiles, and one of the things I’d like to see happen this year is for there to be one .org profile instead of 2 to reduce user confusion. To that end we’d need to be able to do all the current support profile stuff, and to *that* end, I think we’d need to be on up-to-date bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org..

We’ve talked about updating a number of times in the past since the 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 came out. The last time we had this conversation, the high-level agreement was that yes, running current software is good, but the current bbPress plugin has changed some of the workflow stuff that would be annoying for the support team to have to work around. Let’s kick this off!

@ipstenu: you ran down the things that made you say no to bbPress upgrade last time, could you repeat them so we can identify the things we’d need to discuss and/or put in a plugin to make upgrading bbPress on the support forums feasible from the team’s perspective? Let’s not talk about infrastructure stuff here, that’s 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. domain. Just want to identify any features/workflow changes that would be a problem if we upgraded, so we can spec out a plugin to address those things before we do anything else.

#bbpress, #forums

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

Hi support team. I would like to include Support in our Gnome participation this summer if there are any applicants interested in working in the forums etc over the summer. @ipstenu and/or other experienced team members: Head over to https://codex.wordpress.org/Gnome_Summer_Program_for_Women#Support and fill in project ideas (optional, I made a default idea that basically covers answering questions and beefing up support docs) and info on whoever from this team is willing/able to mentor an intern (ideally we put more than one mentor with each student so the time commitment isn’t too heavy). No idea yet how many student slots we’ll get.

#gnome

People seemed to like the idea when I…

People seemed to like the idea when I pitched it. Can we pick a weekend to do it? Having at least 2 weeks notice would be good so people can clear time in schedules, read up on docs if they want, etc. Maybe weekend of February 15?

#20-questions, #contributor-drive