Welcome to the official blog of the community/outreach team for the WordPress open source project!
This team oversees official events, mentorship programs, diversity initiatives, contributor outreach, and other ways of growing our community.
If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!
Getting Involved
We use this blog for policy debates, project announcements, and status reports. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to comment on posts and join the discussion.
You can learn about our current activities on the Team Projects page. These projects are suitable for everyone from newcomers to WordPress community elders.
You can use our contact form to volunteer for one of our projects.
We also have regular Community Team meetings on the first and third Thursdays of every month at 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC in #community-team on Slack (same agenda).
Office hours are usually quite quiet, people ask their questions when it’s convenient for them and deputies forgot to open or close those (regardless of the bot we have to remind us). There is almost always deputy to answer questions or if there isn’t, the question will be caught up later when some deputy sees it.
So, I’d like to question if community hours are really needed and propose their retirement. In exchange there are few things we could do to encourage people to ask questions freely.
During the last community team meetings, few good ideas were conducted from the discussion:
replace the office hours sidebar and welcome box text with something more general about #community-events channel and encouraging to ask questions at all times
having a random empathy bot that reminds #community-team that we should post something encouraging to #community-events if the channel has been quiet for some time
Some concerns were also raised:
some people are waiting for the office hours before asking their questions
we don’t want to loose a human touch so having a bot in #community-events opening/closing office hours, sending random reminder messages or auto-replying is not an option
we need to be very clear that people can ask their questions any time, but know that they may not get an immediate answer
Please share your thoughts about retiring office hours or ideas on how to evolve those! Comments will close 10.4., please leave your comment before that.
Please help us improve our support of meetup organizers and member all over the world by taking 10 minutes to fill out the organizer survey! The survey will be up until the 28th of February 2019.
It would be helpful if organizers could also remind their members to respond to the surveys.
Event Format: Ask me Anything on WordPress
Some meetups are experimenting with new type of meetups format, where organizers and volunteers are hosting an open-office or help desk, where attendees can get to ask about their WordPress problems to experts.
This is a great way for ensuring local WordPress users getting to meet and interact with local WordPress experts.
For more event formats that have worked well in other WordPress meetup groups, check out the meetup organizer handbook page on event formats!
To hear a round table discussion between other meetup organizers about popular topics at meetups, check out this video.
Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops
The diversity outreach speaker training working group is asking for feedback from organizers who have run the diversity speaker training. Send an email to speaker-training@wordcamp.org to get the feedback questionnaire!
For more info, to let us know that you are running a speaker training workshop, and if you want to request training to run the workshop, please check out our page: https://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak
This month’s featured speaker training case study: Kirsten in Vancouver, BC
Diverse public speaking changes lives and local communities. Kirsten took the speaker training workshop and spoke for the first time at WordCamp Vancouver. While there, she was spotted by a local agency and was hired as their first female developer. Kirsten quickly became the senior developer and team lead and is still in this role three years later. Recently she hired another female developer at her company!
“It had never occurred to me before that I had anything worthwhile to offer the WordPress community. Through the workshop, I saw that I had been underestimating my experience and perspective, and I became comfortable and confident about speaking on a topic I felt would be of interest to others.” – Kirsten
Reminders
On the community team we have Office Hours four times a week in the #community-events channel on Slack: Mondays & Wednesdays 22:00 UTC, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:00 UTC.
There is a proposal to improve this newsletter with additional organizer tips and training. You can leave your feedback on this link.
Our bi-monthly Community Team chat is happening this Thursday, 21 January 2019. Meeting times are detailed below. We use the same agenda for both meetings in order to include all time zones.
tl;dr: Let’s brainstorm on how we can change the Community Summit event format to keep the benefits and reduce the pain points!
History and Background
The first WordPress Community Summit was organized in 2012, guided by the idea that face-to-face interactions in a safe space amongst a small number of contributors can help resolve conflicts that are deadlocked.
Build bridges between the people making WordPress (via the contributor groups) and the people doing the best and most influential work built on top of it
Open channels of communication between project leaders, volunteers, and professionals in the community
Learn more about each others’ goals, challenges, and ways we can help each other
Share best practices
Have some social time and get to know each other better
The event has always been invitation-only, to keep the discussion groups small enough that everyone could interact and participate. The smallest summit had around 200 attendees; the largest was around 350 attendees. Most of our community summits have included a travel assistance program to ensure that no invited contributor was unable to attend for financial reasons.
Results and Challenges
We’ve had 4 community summits, which have resulted in some really positive outcomes, including:
identification of shared goals and/or struggles
productive cross-team discussions
conflict resolutions (due to face-to-face interaction or “safe space” conversations? both? hard to tell)
stronger relationships between contributors who attended
Some of the pain points we’ve discovered include:
Invitation-only events are challenging — I’m tempted to say “excruciating” — for our community. The event is, by definition, not inclusive. Not being invited to a summit can be taken to mean, “I’m not important here,” which conflicts with the welcoming and egalitarian environment we value. When you organize an exclusive event like this, you are guaranteed to hurt a lot of feelings.
Selecting “the right people to invite” along with “the right topics to discuss” is very difficult. The method we’ve used most recently has been to ask contributor teams to identify the issues they need to discuss, which then defines the people who need to attend (to cut down on the “popularity contest” effect). But that means discussion topics are selected 3-6 months in advance, which can mean that difficult decisions are put on hold for longer than necessary.
We can’t depend on “fly everyone to the same place” as our primary way to make hard decisions or have productive conversations. For one thing, it’s really expensive (in cash money and in volunteer hours). It also sets artificial limits on how many brains we can focus on a problem or opportunity — only the people in the room can help with a problem that’s being addressed by a (relatively) small group of people.
Looking forward
Where do we go from here? Let’s get creative! I’d love your thoughts on this topic, especially on the following points:
Is there anything missing from the above lists of benefits and pain points?
Do you have suggestions of how WordPress can still enjoy the benefits of this kind of event, while eliminating or reducing the pain points?
To give the conversation some structure, let’s aim to close comments by March 15, 2019. #summit#discussion
Sandy Edwards
3:25 pm on February 19, 2019 Tags: Kids Events
Create a Process for Documentation Create KidsCamp Documentation Create Kids Workshop Documentation Create Kids Club Documentation Create Volunteer Guides Create Legal Document Repo Create Supplies List with Amazon Smile Links (to benefit WordPress Foundation) Create a Guide for Marketing Kids Events to Schools
The goal is to spend about 12 months creating, documenting and polishing the documents and then creating a repo with the Training Team. That will mean a liaison will be needed as some point as well.
@melindahelt When I was helping with the training team and we were starting lesson plans, we had a master list of plans we needed, and people volunteered to write (and then edit and test) each of those pieces. If someone had a suggestion not on the list, we were very open to that as well, but having the list was easy for a new person to come and review the list an pick something they enjoyed/had knowledge about
Kinda like when someone is dealing with an illness and everyone says “what can I do to help” and… often nothing gets done, but if you say “I need A, B, and C” then people step up
@melindahelt I think it’s important to note that everyone can still be involved if they can’t make the meetings – keeping track of chit chat in this channel between meetings will be difficult, but we can use P2 post (blog posts on the make.wordpress.org site) to keep track of things and communicate
@sunsand187 Yes that is 100% on point. I know not everyone is in the slack channels too. If there is no other thoughts or comments we can wrap up this meeting and reconvene on the 7th :slightly_smiling_face: I will post a recap on the community blog (P2).
Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!
Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in Slack and ask for help!
Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. We make sure that new and returning organizers are not overworking themselves, still are following the code of conduct, and generally are making positive contributions to the open source project.
The Deputy Program and all of our committed deputies continue to be a valuable part of our team by keeping the wheels turning and making sure that we are up to date with processing applications, assisting community organisers, and generally making sure we don’t fall behind in our work.
In order to further the work of the Deputy Program and to ensure that it remains sustainable as time goes on, it would be helpful to put together a few goals and implement a few new ideas. These are designed to keep the program fresh, encourage deputy retention, increase deputy skills, and grow our deputy team.
So, first off, here are a few new program ideas that we can implement:
Deputy Mentors
Each deputy mentor would have a group of deputies assigned to them personally and it would be up to the mentor to assist and check-in with their mentees regularly. This would involve helping the deputies with the work they are doing, finding out how they’re enjoying it, making sure they are aware of the latest updates, and training them in additional deputy tasks.
Improved Deputy Documentation
The deputy handbook is great, but some of the most basic information is quite well hidden. This is partly a shortcoming of the handbook structure all across the Make network, but we can definitely improve things to give more high-level summaries of significant areas.
Improved Training Processes
Our current training process takes the form of an online course – this works well for disseminating information and making sure that new deputies have all the information they need. The issue is that it takes a long time to go through the answers submitted by each new deputy to make sure they understood everything correctly. It feels like the best way to improve the deputy training course is to edit all the quizzes to be multiple choice questions (so that they can be graded automatically and a 100% pass is required to move on to the next one), but then have a single quiz at the end that includes a number of long-form questions that require longer answers. This means that grading the course would only require manually doing it for a single quiz for each deputy – this would drastically cut down the time it would take to check these answers.
Editing the quizzes to achieve this will be a bit of work here, but it will be worthwhile in the long run. At the end of the training, deputies will be assigned to a mentor who will have their final orientation call and help them remain connected to the program.
Active Deputy Recruitment
This would involve actively approaching people to become deputies (WordCamp lead organisers being a good starting point of course). We can do this on Slack and this P2, but also in person at WordCamps and meetup events.
If we follow through on these items effectively, we will have more deputies, retain individual deputies for longer, and provide everyone with increasing responsibility to work on more impactful tasks. All of which will work towards the goal of giving deputies a greater sense of belonging within the Community Team.
In addition to those items, here are four measurable goals that we can work towards for the end of Q2 2019. These will all be made possible by working on the four items outlined above:
We did a great job of sending consistent monthly newsletters to meetup organizers in 2018 — great job to @psykro@hlashbrooke@adityakane and everyone else who drafted and sent newsletters last year!
This year, I was thinking it could be cool to broaden the scope of our monthly newsletters. I have two ideas, and would love you to share additional ideas in a comment on this post!
Organizer Tips & Training
First, I think it would be cool to include some “intermediate-level” training content to the newsletter. Community organizers get an orientation when they join our program, and can access our handbooks whenever… but we still don’t have any active “continuing education” opportunities to help organizers grow their skills.
Some intermediate-level topics that come to my mind include:
advantages to organizing simple events that are easy to replicate
recruiting volunteers through imperfection and transparency
communication tips for avoiding conflict in your community
organizing tasks that offer a gentle, accessible path to leadership
tips for welcoming newcomers to the group
responding to suggestions and criticism
tips for recruiting new speakers
responding to people offering to speak, especially when their proposal isn’t interesting
different ways to handle all-group communication
Here’s how I’m envisioning the execution of this idea:
At the beginning of every month, we publish a little summary of some pre-existing knowledge on a topic like the ones above. The article should include a call for suggestions or feedback, so that other community organizers can share their thoughts or experiences in this area. Hopefully this provides a chance to connect with other WordPress community organizers!
Mid-month, the person writing the newsletter includes a summary of the discussion-so-far in the newsletter text, and encourages organizers to check out the whole thread on make/community.
At the end of the month, we gather all the suggestions and ideas into a handbook page. If we can do this consistently, we’ll have at least 10 more pages of useful handbook content by the end of this year! Wow!
If it proves too challenging to add the accumulated content to the handbook every month, that could be a nice, no-expertise-required task for new contributors at a contributor day.
Contributor Team Spotlight
Many people, WordPress community organizers included, don’t know much about all the other contributor teams that do cool stuff to help WordPress flourish. To address this, we could do a monthly Contributor Team Spotlight, with a little information about the goals of the team, when they meet in Slack, links to their team blog and handbook, and how you can get involved if you want to help.
This might be a little harder to pull together, as it requires some cross-team outreach, but maybe someone here will feel passionate about this idea? 😉
Execution would be pretty simple, just post a paragraph with all that information on the monthly “Anything to add to the newsletter this month?” post.
Feedback?
Does this seem like a good idea?
Are there any other organizer tips or intermediate-level topics you would like to see us discuss/add?
What teams could we most easily spotlight in the newsletter?
Is there any other content you think we should add to the monthly newsletter?
Leave your ideas, concerns, and any other feedback in a comment on this post!
Things we decided in our Train the Trainers call on the weekend to try out
Helping you run the workshop in your own city – questions? obstacles?
Helping a newbie meetup
This month’s newsletter article
Next actions
Reports:
What are you working on? How is it going? Do you have any obstacles?
@miriamgoldman
I am working on writing out my story, and also planning an onboarding meeting for train the trainers. Obstacle is time.
@jillbinder
The story is lower priority than everything else. It’s a nice to have when you are ready and have the time. So for now I’m happy for you to focus on your other items for us.
@jillbinder
I am currently focusing mostly on picture items:
Smoothing out our communication and project management
Smoothing out our Meetups life cycle for Train the Trainers
@angelasjin
A little HS triage, working with Jill on Calendly after this meeting, Obstacle is also time.
@jillbinder @jamieschmid sent in a report that Larry and she have had a few review sessions for the communications plan and she is doing the final revision to discuss with me soon.
@angelasjin That’s awesome! Looking forward to hearing more about that plan. I think it’ll be really helpful for this group
@sheilagomes
I’ve finished the translation of the first part of the material, and will just give it a final review, but will deliver today.
@jillbinder
I’m looking forward to that. I am planning on being in touch with the Training team in their meeting hopefully tomorrow to find out where our translations should live.
@simo70
I’m starting Italian translation on the first lesson (thanks to @sheilagomes)
@jillbinder
To help our team smooth out the edges and create something sustainable and scaleable, we have now formed sub teams. The Translations team is off to a strong start. Great work!
@jamieschmid and @laryswan are working on the (to be named) Communications team(?). They will be ready to present us with exercise(s) soon for our foundation, especially the name of our group, our hashtag, and some of our internal vocabulary.
Trello for Project Management
Speaking of sub teams, you may be wondering how to see what the teams are and what everyone is working on….
There was frustration using the placeholder spreadsheet I had created for our project/team tracker, so I have now put our stuff into the much-requested Trello.
It is another experiment. Much like the rest of the WP community, I believe in trying things quickly and iterating quickly.
I feel better about it being our new placeholder (and possibly permanent solution, seeing how it goes) as now it’ll be easier to scan, folks can update on the threads how it is going, and you’ll get email notifications.
As always, I am always very open to feedback. We want to create a system that is easy for all so that it becomes invisible and we focus on the great impact we are having.
Any initial thoughts on the new format?
Each column is a team or subteam.
The spreadsheet had a line for every little task, but now the tasks are bunched into their bigger project.
Each card follows a template with the meta info that I thought was most important:
What
Why
Deliverable
By when
The two items that I didn’t include from the spreadsheet were Road Blocks (obstacles) and KPI on each individual task.
They were starting to seem like clutter to me.
Hopefully people will communicate their obstacles as they come up.
@angelasjin
I like that for now. If I remember correctly, you can assign cards to people, but they don’t disappear from the main list. That way you have the individuals working on each item without having to type it out, right?
@jillbinder
Yes we can assign cards to people, which I have gone ahead and done. And yes, they don’t disappear like they do in HelpScout, so everyone sees everything. You can just view your own if you wish to, but that is not the default.
@sheilagomes
Looks good! And it can even be integrated with Slack for attributing tasks, as far as I remember.
@jillbinder
That is great! We’ll see how that works in our work flow. It might be useful.
Trello is also very flexible to make it whatever we want it to be. So this formatting I chose is a first guess. I’m sure that feedback will come as folks start using it.
@sheilagomes and @simo70 I’m looking forward to seeing your progress in your column. Hopefully it’ll be easier to do that now.
For example, Simona could create a new card for the Italian translation.
One of the main goals of this is to make our work more transparent to the rest of the team so we all know what we are doing. Should help with folks knowing the bigger picture, and cheering each other on and/or helping when we are stuck.
@jillbinder @simo70 I haven’t checked if you did this, but you have the option to use the Card Template if you’d like:
https://trello.com/c/FFof7NXE/3-card-template
@sheilagomes
Yes, we can upload files too, should I do it with the file I’m delivering today? It’s just a small text file
@jillbinder @sheilagomes Good question. Team, should we keep things in direct messages on Slack or start sharing on Trello?
I’ll give that a think, and let others give that a think too. For now, either way is fine with me.
Things we decided in our Train the Trainers call on the weekend to try out
Train the Trainers had a call to start ironing out our processes. It wound up being our first call of two, as we had a lot of ground to cover!
Here are some of the things that we decided:
I did up a prettier version of the Meetups Life Cycle in a mind mapping tool so that we can all look at the process, smooth it out, and @jamieschmid could create a Domain Map based on it.
It includes some of the new decisions that we made about our process.
As always, please give me feedback on anything so that it’s the most usable for us.
It’s also available to be edited directly, if you request access from me.
Some changes to our HelpScout process. HelpScout is where we answer the emails that come in from the Meetups.
In order for each trainer to manage the emails from their own scheduled training, but not have those emails disappear from the rest of the team, we are trying out giving those emails a tag with that trainer’s name and a note as to why we are tagging them.
That is something I’m communicating with @cguntur as she is the first responder.
We still need to come up with a plan for what to do with the emails that are not tagged and are asking questions that would lead to signing up for another training.
We are looking more closely at event management tools to help meetups be more likely to attend and to reduce our workload. @angelasjin and I are taking a look at Calendly Pro today to start exploring if it’ll work for us.
@jillbinder Until we have an event management tool in place, we are adding checkboxes to the sign up form where they indicate their possible interested times. I’m asking @cguntur if she can then tag their message with those trainers’ names.
And even if we have the tool in place, we might keep the checklist up as well. We shall see! Or find another way to integrate the event tool in seamlessly.
@angelasjin I added our event management tool wish list to the Trello card. (Hooray for details like that no longer getting lost!) Let’s look at that in our meeting today.
We have quite a list to get through for more items. We were thinking of using calendly to test out creating a time for the next meeting.
Helping you run the workshop in your own city – questions? obstacles?
I think that those who have shown up today are all folks who have already done it or are already in the works of doing it soon.
So this is more of a reminder to the rest of the folks on the team, as well as a reminder that if your city ran it last year, it still takes planning to do it again this year.
I myself have started the planning process for Vancouver. Even though my project work is now a few steps away from the workshop, it’s a good idea for me to stay close with the actual workshop.
@miriamgoldman
We’ve just submitted the application to Central for Ottawa, so once approved, I’ll hopefully be kickstarting planning for Ottawa in mid-March to early April. Fingers crossed.
Helping a newbie meetup
Fred Prasuhn Greetings all. I am calling on the help of the community for the Meetup I facilitate. The group began and continues to be WP newbies. YEA!!!
I enjoy helping others learn; it is the educator in me. What I need help with is Meetup topics and game plan. I would like to come up with several months of topics so I can study up as needed, recruit others to lead the discussion/teaching, and secure resources to share. Basically, the group members do not know what they do not know.
@jillbinder
Your questions are somewhat related to our meeting about diverse speakers at WordPress events, so we can give some tips from our point of view.
@angelasjin
You can also ask in the #community-events channel. There are a lot of organizers there who can share ideas for Meetup topics and event formats!
@jillbinder
Being a newbie group, I would encourage them to have some talks about what they are learning as they are learning. How they created their first …. , mistakes they made when they …., etc.
And you can also learn about topics yourself, have them learn about topics and deliver on them, reach out to other experienced presenters, or even have WordPress.tv nights where you all watch one of the thousands of great talks that have been recorded at WordCamps together and discuss them.
On the first point of developing your local speakers,
we have a workshop!
You can read more about it, get the link to the workshop, let us know if you’re planning to run it, and request training if you wish at:
https://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak
Meetup Newsletter
I’m especially proud of the meetup newsletter article I submitted this month.
In addition to letting folks know what we do, I also did a call out for them to fill out our email questionnaire, AND I did our second “feature”, and this one is really great. Her story shows the power of our work and her quote perfectly encapsulates exactly how we help folks overcome their Impostor Syndrome and be ready and motivated to speak:
This month’s feature: Kirsten in Vancouver, BC
Diverse public speaking changes lives and local communities. Kirsten took the workshop, spoke for the first time at WordCamp Vancouver, got spotted by a local agency, became their first female developer, quickly became the senior developer and team lead, is still in this role three years later, and even brought on another female developer!
“It had never occurred to me before that I had anything worthwhile to offer the WordPress community. Through the workshop, I saw that I had been underestimating my experience and perspective, and I became comfortable and confident about speaking on a topic I felt would be of interest to others.” – Kirsten
Do you know an individual or a Meetup/WordCamp who have benefited from the workshop? Please contact @jillbinder on the WordPress Slack.
And with that inspiring and uplifting reminder that our efforts make a big difference, I shall close today’s meeting.
Thanks for attending, and thanks for all the great work you are doing!
@jillbinder talks to #training team to find out where Translations should live – tomorrow
@miriamgoldman reads through the message in Helpscout and checks if she can hold a Training at the time and on a day that she needs. (Jill tag Miriam.)
Team, feedback on our Trello? https://trello.com/b/xnIFkJo0/diversity-outreach-speaking-training-project-tracker
Team, should we keep documents in direct messages on Slack or start sharing on Trello?
Team, feedback on our Meetups Life Cycle mind map? https://www.mindmeister.com/1215137447?t=YWzQsjLPqb
