Author Archives: Jen

Jen 8:18 pm on June 29, 2015
Tags:   

Community Team Catch-up

A lot of moving and shaking on the community team, and we’ll be posting weekly updates moving forward.

  • Good intentions with the deputies program as created at the WCSF Summit in October 2014 did not pan out as expected. While more people were involved with 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. oversight, some additional bottlenecks were introduced, some volunteers left for various reasons, and the email queue for WCs and meetups was backed up so far that the average response time was more than 60 days.
  • As of 2 weeks ago, Andrea Middleton and I are returning to the community team (we had stepped back at the beginning of the year).
  • We are reviewing all team processes and ruthlessly tearing them apart in an effort to reduce bottlenecks, increase transparency, and give deputies more independent authority.
  • We are starting to post daily updates from deputies on the team blog to make it easier for people to know what’s happening within the team.
  • We are adding more deputies, including people whose employers are donating their time a certain number of hours. The goal is to especially flesh out our deputy ranks in past of the world other than North America.
  • We are revamping documentation.
  • We are experimenting with supportflow to replace supportpress. It is so buggy it took almost 2 weeks just to get it working, and it caused some problems with our meetup.com account during a massive email spree bug incident.
  • There are currently 22 WordCamps on the schedule between now and the end of the year, and another 31 on the pending list waiting to announce a date (based on signing venue contract/budget approval).
  • Applications for hosting WCUS close at the end of the month and a location will be chosen by Matt in early July.
  • The wordpress.tv team has spun off into its own team at https://make.wordpress.org/tv.

That’s the gist of it.

It looks like a bunch of other teams have also stopped posting here, so we may reach out and try to get other teams going again.

#community

Jen 1:11 pm on September 8, 2014
Tags: , WordCamp San Franciso   

WCSF Tickets and Stuff

Tickets sales for 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. San Francisco will be opening this week, so I wanted to do a pre-emptive note to all the contributor teams about some things we expect people to ask.

  • We are trying out an update to the ticketing system, which asks you to log in with your 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/ username (or create one). Since everyone on these teams has a wordpress.org username, this shouldn’t be a problem for any of you. Why are we doing this? So we can reflect WC participation in profiles.
  • For those staying for the summit day and 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. days, this regular conference ticket covers you. If you are planning to skip the presentation days and just do the community days, still buy the regular ticket. We’ll ask people to specify which days they’re attending sometime after the schedule has been posted.
  • Worried we’ll sell out before you get a ticket? Don’t worry. We have a block of tickets reserved for contributors just like you, so if you’re traveling, in an opposite time zone, or just likely to oversleep, we can give you a special link to buy your ticket if we sell out. Never again: http://twitter.com/markjaquith/status/216596401713459200/photo/1
  • People receiving travel assistance are expected to buy tickets. Some travel assistance recipients have not yet responded to the offer, so we’ll be pinging those people this week as well to see what’s up.
  • People applying for visas should not buy a ticket until after the visa is approved. Again, don’t worry about tickets selling out. We have some in reserve for this, and giving a reservation link is easier than doing a refund (and doesn’t cost us anything, unlike a refund).
  • We’ll be opening a forum on the WCSF site after the first rush of ticket excitement has died down a bit, that will allow everyone to propose topics for the unconference day. Unlike the 2012, we’ll be setting the schedule in advance, so figuring out who wants to talk about what and with whom in these forums will be a good thing to do in the first couple of weeks in October, to give us a week to put together the grid.
  • Team meetups. This is the first time we’ve arranged for every team to have a face-to-face meetup. Historic moment! This isn’t just a chance to meet face-to-face, though. We’re expecting teams to take advantage of this opportunity to talk about issue, review progress (or lack thereof), set goals, and have discussions that will improve the processes and output of the teams. Working on a specific project together that’s been neglected or hasn’t been prioritized so there’s also a tangible output from the meetup is expected. Each group should start talking about their potential agenda and project. In a couple of weeks I’ll be asking team reps to let me know what their teams are considering, so we can work out an overall plan and set expectations for everyone.

Once the teams have talked about plans and they’ve been collected and checked to make sure no one’s trying to tackle too big a project or something, we’ll post all the team agendas/projects and a list of who’s attending.

#wcsf2014, #wordcamp-san-franciso

Jen 11:21 pm on June 16, 2014
Tags:   

WCSF Travel Assistance Application

Since there was a lot of interest in the travel assistance program when I posted last week, I wanted to follow up with the link now that the form is live: http://2014.sf.wordcamp.org/location/travel-assistance/

If you need financial assistance to cover the travel costs to WCSF and want to apply, do so by June 30 (2 weeks from now). We’ll figure out how much we can offer people the following week, and all notifications will be sent out by July 7.

#wcsf2014

Jen 11:28 pm on June 12, 2014
Tags: contributor teams, , ,   

WordCamp San Francisco Travel & Contributor Days

Hi folks! We are getting ready to publish a bunch of information about 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. San Francisco tomorrow, but wanted give you contributors a heads up in advance.

Note to newsy blogs: if you would hold off on posting about this until the information goes live at 2014.sf.wordcamp.org tomorrow, that would be greatly appreciated. We keep these contributor team blogs public for the sake of transparency, but they’re intended for contributor communication, not a backchannel to pre-empting public announcements. Since there will be a lot of public interest in the WCSF info, giving us a day for internal communication will help us produce a better public event. Thanks!

If you are a WordPress contributor — in addition to the teams on make.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/, this includes locale-specific contributors like WordCamp/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. organizers and translators — please take a moment after you read this post to let us know if you think you will attend WCSF and if we should include you in our planning estimates. (link at bottom)

Schedule and Format

Many of you have participated in discussions on the /community team blog about this, and thanks for all your thoughtful questions and suggestions. Here’s what we’ve decided on:

Friday, October 24
Most people will be arriving on this day. The day will include a whirlwind of activity for the organizing team, which will be headquartered at the Automattic Lounge. That evening will be the volunteer orientation, and we’ll have an optional early registration/check-in for .org contributor teams. The check-in will allow you to skip the registration line at Mission Bay on Saturday morning.

Saturday, October 25
All-day conference at Mission Bay Conference Center, the same venue we’ve used for the last few years. Presentations will be both upstairs and downstairs as always. Afterparty at the Automattic Lounge.

Sunday, October 26
All-day conference at Mission Bay Conference Center, with the intention that the downstairs room will be used for a series of contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.-style workshops/sessions led by members of each contributor team in lieu of a separate contributor/dev day like we’ve had in the past. Matt’s State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. presentation will be on this day.

Monday, October 27
All-day discussion-format unconference at the Automattic Lounge, similar to the 2012 Community Summit, but with a couple of differences.
1. Instead of pitching discussion ideas at the beginning of the day, we’ll set up a forum in advance so people can pitch ideas and talk about which ideas deserve the air time for group discussions. More information around the logistics of this will be forthcoming next week, but you can start thinking about discussion topics. 🙂
2. It will not be invite-only. While keeping an attendance cap is something everyone agreed was a big factor in the success of the summit, the invitation format was not particularly in keeping with the goals of the project for everything to be open, open, open. So we’ll have an attendance cap based on the space, but registration will be open to all. It will not cost anything on top of the regular conference ticket, but it will require a separate sign up. We’ll make sure that active contributor team members get first crack at signing up, and then open up the remaining spots to the general community with some specific language making it clear that this part of the event is intended for contributors and WP professionals, not beginners, that it is all discussions, no presentations, etc.

Tuesday — Wednesday, October 28-29
Contributor Team Coworking at the Automattic Lounge. These days are not ticketed, they’re the equivalent of the old coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team meetups we used to do out on Tybee, but for each of the contributor teams, with the ability to talk with the other contributor teams as needed for projects-/ssues that involve multiple teams. So it will be up to each team to decide who should be invited to be part of that (though I’ll need coordinate with each team for logistics).

Travel/Lodging

A few things on this topic.

Travel Assistance
We’ve budgeted a chunk of money for a travel assistance program intended to help people attend in two areas. We want to make it easier to attend for folks for whom it’s a financial hardship to travel to SF for the event (either for personal finance reasons, or for geographic reasons like living in a country where flights to SF are 3 times the price of a US flight to SF), as well as bringing in a more diverse contributor/attendee pool that includes people from international communities that might not normally consider attending. There will be an application form to apply for travel assistance on the wcsf site.

Hotels
October is the loveliest month in San Francisco, which means it will be awesome. It also means peak rates. AND there’s a medical conference in town during the week when we have the coworking time that is booking 18,000 SF hotel rooms, so convenient hotels will be expensive. To that end, we are booking several blocks of rooms now just to be safe. We’ll use these to house the travel assistance recipients, speakers, possibly the most active contributors, and will offer any leftover rooms for sale to attendees at the rates we are getting.

Because we are signing contracts now just to make sure we’ll have enough rooms to actually provide travel assistance, we want to make sure we get enough rooms but don’t buy out more than we’ll need (because, you know, lots of money). To that end, it would help us immeasurably to get a rough headcount of contributors who are planning to attend, to find out if they’d want to stay for the whole time or just part of it, and if they would be looking for travel assistance and/or would want to buy a room in one of the blocks we are holding.

If you are a WordPress contributor — in addition to the teams on make.wordpress.org, this includes locale-specific contributors like WordCamp/meetup organizers and translators — please take a moment to let us know in this short survey if you think you will attend WCSF and if we should include you in our planning estimates.

Phew! Thanks for reading all that, and thanks in advance for filling in the survey by the end of the weekend so we know if we should sign one more hotel contract on Monday or not.

June 16 Update: Here’s the official application for travel assistance.

#contributor-teams, #wcsf, #wcsf2014, #wordcamp

Jen 6:34 pm on April 24, 2014
Tags: , feedback,   

Contributor Experience Survey

Attention team reps: Please pass this survey along to your teams via your team blogs and ask folks to take it and also to spread the word. Use whatever wording you like. 🙂

Take the contributor experience survey — it’s short, and none of the questions are mandatory. Please post, tweet, tell your co-contributors/community members via any/all communication methods. Thanks! Here’s the link: http://wordpressdotorg.polldaddy.com/s/wordpress-contributor-experience-poll

Anyone else reading this, you don’t need to post to the team blog, but if you could take the survey and help spread the word, that would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks from the community outreach team. 🙂

#contributors, #feedback, #survey

Jen 6:40 pm on April 17, 2014
Tags: , ,   

I posted a proposal for WCSF format over…

I posted a proposal for WCSF format over at the community team blog (since our team handles events and WCSF): https://make.wordpress.org/community/2014/04/17/putting-more-community-in-wcsf/

Anyone wanting to talk about doing another retreat-type summit vs adding community discussions to the agenda of WCSF is welcome to comment there. Please share with your teams, thanks.

#events, #summit, #wcsf

Jen 1:56 am on March 8, 2014
Tags:   

Community Team Update: March 7, 2014

Amy has gotten busy with work, so I’ll be handling our team updates for the time being. Since it’s been awhile for our team posting something, this week I’ll describe the stuff we’re working on, and go back to the more succinct bulleted lists next week.

tl;dr: Our team is growing in active members and projects, and we’re excited about it.

Meetups

There are around 70 groups on the chapter account now, with more due to roll-in at the next quarterly mark at the beginning of next month. We sent out surveys for organizers and members of all meetups in the program and will be posting the results of that next week. Some of the bigger meetups have joined lately (like Austin) and/or will be in the next roll-in (like Boston), so we should have some good momentum as we move into spring. Andy McIlwain from the Toronto community has volunteered to help with the program and started getting trained on administration this week.
The community team focuses on meetups in the team chat on the 1st Thursday of each month. 

Mentorships/Diversity

  • We were accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. The application period opens soon, and at that point we’ll be pretty busy for about 2 weeks fielding questions, reviewing applications, handling irc chats, etc. @samuelsidler has volunteered to be the backup admin and help me wrangle it this year. Thanks, Sam!
  • Still have a few contrib groups to talk to about the in-house mentorship program, but hoping to kick off the one-month ‘contributor onramp’ set within the coming month. In the community team we’ll be doing ours in the areas of 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. organizing, WC organizing, and wordpress.tv moderation.
  • We opted not to participate in OPW this year, agreeing that getting our in-house programs in order was a higher priority and would allow us to help more people in the long run. We hope to do OPW again in the future.
  • There was a workshop in Vancouver for women to brainstorm topics and/or get comfortable with public speaking for WordCamps/WordPress meetups. Similar workshops are being planned for Seattle and Portland this month, after which we hope to post a standard workshop curriculum (to be used by anyone/everyone, not just for diversity outreach).
  • WordPress will be a sponsor for the Tech Mix It Up diversity mixer at Philly Tech Week.
  • Work continues slow but steady on workshop curriculums. The one for child theming as about done.
  • Going to work with Girl Develop It on standardizing their WP curriculums (via team member Tracy Levesque, who’s also a GDI instructor).

The community team focuses on mentorships/diversity in the team chat on the 2nd Thursday of each month. 

WordCamps

There’s a 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. in Dayton this weekend, followed by Atlanta and Mumbai next weekend. At the end of April we start “WordCamp Season,” when there are generally multiple WordCamps every weekend. In addition to the 29 WCs already on the schedule, there are a bunch more trying to nail down their dates. Full schedule at http://central.wordcamp.org/schedule/
The community team focuses on meetups in the team chat on the 3rd Thursday of each month. 

Contributor Recognition/Site Stuff

We are working on an updated version of profiles.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/. In addition to technical changes (starting from last year’s GSoC project by Mert), there’ll be some design updating as  well as a badge system to recognize contributors of all types. Hoping/planning to launch v1 next week and then do 2-week iterations moving forward to keep improving it.

Hey Team Reps: Will want to talk with you about how to tell who’s an active member on your teams so the stuff that’s manual now could hopefully be automated in the future.

The community team focuses on contributor recognition & site stuff in the team chat on the 4th Thursday of each month. 

#community

Jen 6:19 pm on February 25, 2014
Tags:   

Team Reps Looking for input on what’s important…

Team Reps: Looking for input on what’s important for wordpress.org profiles. If you could ask your teams to weigh in on this thread: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2014/02/25/profiles-how-do-you-use-them-or-want-to/ that would be great. Thanks!

#profiles

Jen 12:55 am on January 28, 2014
Tags:   

Team Reps

We’re a little overdue to re-up/choose/elect team reps again based on the last round. We can do that, or we can go back to a longer term for reps, or we can revisit the concept of team reps.

  • Some teams are better than others about getting the updates posted.
  • On some teams the rep also acts as a lead, while on others it’s just posting updates.
  • The job description is to post updates and to be a liaison between your team and the rest of the contributor groups via this site. There are a lot of weekly updates, but not so much liaising. When I’ve posted things for comment, it has appeared that people are responding based on their own opinion rather than getting their team’s group opinion and relating it back.

So! Can everyone check with their team to see what they think and report back here? If we want to go with the status quo, then each team should choose their early 2014 rep this week. How the team chooses is up to the team. If any teams want to propose a different approach, hit the comment sections (please speak for your team rather than putting out suggestions that haven’t been run by them first).

Thanks!

#team-reps

Jen 10:31 pm on December 6, 2013  

Community Summit

Heads up: this is a little long in order to provide relevant background information to newer team reps and contributors. tl;dr version: I propose that the next community summit event be back to back with 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. San Francisco this year.

We had a team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. dinner after WCSF 2013 (WordCamp San Francisco, the official annual WordPress conference) this year and discussed the possibility of doing another community summit like the one I organized last October in Tybee Island. There was agreement that we should, and the plan was to look at locations and dates. Some research was done by a small team on possible locations, and then we talked about asking the community for suggestions on locations. I never put out that call for location suggestions because I realized that we’d overlooked something in our timing decision that had been key in deciding the 2012 date: WCSF.

When I planned the first summit in 2012, it was because I thought there was a need for an event that was more focused on contributors and key players in the community, and based on the conversation/unconference model of the Community Leadership Summit event organized each year by Jono Bacon from Ubuntu. Matt was generous in approving the experiment and allowing a fair bit of leeway to see if it would be a worthwhile event. The decision we came to then was that he (and Andrea from WC Central along with others) would organize a traditional WCSF in 2012, and I’d do the experimental event, which came to be called the Community Summit.

We talked about doing the summit in SF adjacent to the main WCSF event, but there were three factors that  made me push back against that:

  • It was March when we decided I’d organize a summit event, and WCSF was only a couple of months away. I worried that people who’d already arranged WCSF travel would be negatively impacted financially if we asked them to change their plans.
  • San Francisco is very expensive, and I was concerned about renting space based on my knowledge of SF venue costs.
  • If we wanted to do the summit over a weekend so no one had to take time off work, then we’d be asking a lot of people to stay in SF for a week in between, which would be not only expensive but inconvenient to folks with families (and require more time off for folks with non-wp day jobs).

That was was why we wound up doing it in October, in Tybee (cheap), and over a weekend.

When we started talking about choosing a date/location for a second summit, we failed to take WCSF into account. After reviewing some numbers around contributor locations, travel costs, and WCSF 2013 attendance info, I think we should revisit the plan to have a summit that happens completely separately from WCSF. Here’s why, compared to the reasons I opted to separate them in 2012:

  • We are getting ready to announce WCSF 2014 dates now, so there would be plenty of time for travel planning, visa applications, etc.
  • Now that Automattic has that giant space (which wasn’t in play in 2012), we could do the summit there, bypassing the need to spend any money on a venue at all. As the person who does the fundraising, this is very appealing, because then more money can go to travel scholarships.
  • If we do a summit for a few days bumped up against WCSF, then that means one flight cost for 2 events, which is good not only for those footing their own travel bills but also for travel scholarship availability.

When I looked at the stats for WCSF 2013 and the last summit, that’s what really pushed me into thinking this would be the best approach.

  • 67% of WCSF attendees came from out of town.
  • 78% of those identified themselves as WordPress professionals.
  • About half of Summit attendees also attended WCSF. Many of those who did not attend both were travel scholarship recipients at the summit (WCSF did not have travel scholarships last year, but I want to do them this year), or work for companies that wouldn’t pay for them to attend both.

Those figures, tied with the fact that WCSF really functions as an unofficial summit (that some people miss out on), make me believe strongly that it would be best for the project to bring these events together to get the most bang for the buck with travel and other costs. We’ve just reserved the venue for WCSF 2014 (though it won’t officially be announced until next week when we have a placeholder site), and the date is the weekend of October 25th. I propose that we do a contributor/community summit in the days preceding this weekend, making one big official event for the project instead of splitting effort and financing between the two.

I know it’s later in the year than we had originally discussed (this is due to venue renovations and schedule limitations), but it would mean more time for planning a great event, raising money, applying for visas, booking affordable travel, etc., and we could potentially include more people in the summity stuff (or parts of it).In the meantime, we could try to plan a virtual summit for earlier in the year.

Sound good?