Jen posted a big post on Mentorship Programs earlier this week. The plan with internal mentorship programs is to pilot both one-on-one and small group mentorships for new contributors to different teams within the project. Cool!

It’s also time to plan for external programs for this summer: the GSoC application is coming up in mid-February, and Jen’s looking for a volunteer to help manage the program: add a comment to the mentorship post if you’re interested in helping out. We’re still undecided on whether to participate in the Gnome Outreach Program for Women again — we’ll be gathering feedback as well as looking for fundraising sources.

In 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. news: This is the last week to nominate your city for the next WordCamp Europe or join the team.

#community

The community team didn’t meet this week, as Andrea, Jen and I were all on the road (or in the air) at our regular meeting time. The following updates come from Jen:

Past Week:

• Chatted with Matt re community expectations doc, doing a revamp based on his input.
• Posted re definitions of WCs/event naming for comment, next step will be to chat with Matt about it.
• We have 52 Meetups on the central account now. An additional 17 are on the list waiting for meetup.com to add them to the account, including Seattle, Orlando, Miami, Milwaukee, and Beijing. With the exception of 2 new group applications that have some issues re trademark pending, all new group applications are caught up.
• Talked with Scott re profiles project, notes on /meta
• Talked with Joseph from 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) group about using WP to publish their test reports rather than githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/+dropbox.

Coming Week:

• Will circulate expectation doc to the volunteer group to review changes based on talk with Matt before bringing to Matt for comment and publishing here for community feedback. Target timing end of week for getting to volunteers, next week for Matt/community.
• Andrea and I are headed to WC Phoenix this week/end.
• Send out the 1st annual 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. member survey.
• Send invites to join the central account to active WordPress meetups.
• Send out swag packs to meetups.
• Schedule the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. dev leads meetup.
• Send out 3.8 core contributor feedback survey.
• Publish 2013 in Review post on .org news blog

#community

• WCSF dates have been announced for October 2014. The date shifted because the venue will be under construction over the summer.
• Discussion of Community Summit is ongoing. Nothing has been decided yet, and it won’t be until at least after the new year.
• Andrea posted a WordCamp update for October – December. Keep an eye out for the full end-of-year 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. update with stats extravaganza over on the WC Central blog.
• On the meetup front, Jen is working on getting existing meetup groups into the central WP Meetup account. An overview is here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/12/10/meetup-com-transfers-these-applications-to-join-the/
• We’re looking for new volunteers to help coordinate training programs & materials.
• I’ve seen a question or two in IRC lately about whether we’ll be participating inmentorship programs (GSOC and the like) for next year. So, as a general reminder in case any of you see the question come up, we do plan to participate again, but we have to apply for each program separately, usually in the spring for summer programs — so please tell any potential students that we can’t say yet that we’re participating, but there will be announcements about each program individually as soon as there’s news to report.

#community

It’s been too long since the last update. That’s all on me, and my apologies! But we’ve been keeping busy:

WordPress was a mentor organization at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Jen’s writeup is here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/10/09/last-weekend-we-participated-in-the-grace-hopper/

Please take a look at the discussion of starting up a community expectations team: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/29/community-expectations/

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. Stats (since Sept 20):

• 87 WordCamp videos published at WordPress.tv
• 1051 WordCamp tickets sold
• published the date for Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Paris, Lima, and Sevilla
• approved for pre-planning Charleston, Chicago, Atlanta, Mumbai, Brighton, Asheville, NC

If you’re a WordCamp organizer, or thinking of applying, please check out this discussion on WordCamp scheduling: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/10/18/licking-the-wordcamp-cookie/

Training materials can now be found at the Training Blog: https://make.wordpress.org/training/

#community

This week:

• Tagretator had a test run at two WordCamps and is now in the plugin directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tagregator/
• Andrea trained a team of 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. volunteers to review 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. websites every week.
• Our Gnome OPW intern Siobhan to spending her last 2 weeks working on fleshing out troubleshooting tuts. Outline: https://make.wordpress.org/community/troubleshooting-workshop-outline/
• Courtney kicked off the Theme School project: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/19/theme-school-curriculum/
• Jen announced a project to make better speakers
• This week’s WC stats: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/19/anything-for-tomorrows-update/#comment-6537

Upcoming:

• WordPress is one of the projects at the Grace Hopper Celebration’s 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. Day

#community

• The Taggregator goes live this weekend! This is 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 that allows social media related to each 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. to be aggregated in a central place. If you saw the WP10 site, you know the idea. Testing at WordCamps Buffalo and Albuquerque.
• Mentorships: GSOC and GOW are wrapping up soon, and interns and mentors are scheduling their final reviews.
• Training:
  • I’m working on breaking down the troubleshooting workshops into more manageable chunks to work on them asynchronously.
  • Theme school: will be published in separate modules from the outset. Next goal: identify which piece to start with.
• Many more Community updates: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/12/its-time-for-our-weekly-call-for-stuff/#comment-6504
• All the nitty-gritty on WordCamps/Events: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/12/its-time-for-our-weekly-call-for-stuff/#comment-6508

#community

Events + Community P2 merger – latest progress is here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/09/05/importing-events/

We had our first weekly meeting as a team. We’ll be meeting regularly on Thursdays. Logs for this week: https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-contribute&day=2013-09-05&sort=asc#m7335

Ongoing projects, and calls for new volunteers/projects

• Amy coordinating troubleshooting curriculum 2.0
• Courtney wrangling the Theme School materials
• Jen putting out the call for new volunteers for diversity, education outreach, and community management

This week in WordCamps:

• 17 videos published to WordPress.tv
• 288 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. tickets sold
• WordCamp Detroit was cancelled
• WordCamp Baroda was approved for pre-planning
• WordCamp Wroclaw opened ticketing
• requested interviews with some applicants to take over Sao Paulo and an applicant in Dayton
• Announced volunteers helping respond to WordCamp applications: https://make.wordpress.org/events/2013/08/30/wordcamp-central-now-has-a-team-of-volunteers/
• met with the organizing team of WP Weekend PHX to discuss them coming under the WordCamp umbrella
• re-ordered WordPress stickers for WordCamp swag
• WordCamp Cape Town organizers wrote a payment gateway for CampTix to be able to interface with local South African payment processor PayFast

Coming week:

• write a checklist for reviewing WordCamp web sites & recruit some volunteers for that
• get shipping info for WordCamps to multi-event sponsors so they can ship swag
• interview Dayton & Sao Paulo applicants
• nag some WordCamps about posting their videos to wp.tv
• more posts to the 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. blog
• write a spec for WordCamp ratings system on Central
• continue to support the 20 camps in planning and 15 camps in pre-planning

#community