The activity stream in profiles now has the…

The activity stream in profiles now has the updated data fields (posts on make blogs, additional tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. activity, wc speakers, etc). Note that while we are backfilling all the old WC speaker info, it’s showing up as new activity because that activity is based on pub date. So on my profile, for example, the most recent item is “Confirmed as a speaker 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. Portland 2010, 7 hours ago” because @camikaos entered those old PDX speakers earlier today.

#profiles

Team Chat Agenda, Feb 27, 2014

It’s the 4th Thursday of the month, so the focus is “Contrib recognition, site stuff” — kind of a perfect day to talk about profiles, right? Thinking we might try a combo IRC/hangout so we can show what we’ve done so far this week, and since Andrea, Ian, Cami, Rebecca, and I are all in the same place today. If that sounds good, will post a hangout link before meeting time.

To suggest additional agenda items, leave a comment.

#agenda, #team-meeting

WordCamp Paris is about to start uploading its…

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. Paris is about to start uploading its videos. Since we don’t currently have a french-speaking moderator in the group, I’ve invited Hanni Ross (@bothanni) to join the team and help review French-language videos. Hanni has been contributing to the WP community for many years (predating her years at Automattic) and speaks both French and English fluently. Welcome Hanni, and thanks for helping out! 🙂

#french, #new-moderators, #wordpress-tv

Expanding WordCamp.org Data Fields

We collect a lot of information when organizing WordCamps, and it’s often saved to a 3rd party service like Google Drive, Dropbox, TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing., Basecamp, etc.

It’d be great if we could store this information on WordCamp.org sites instead.

What we’re proposing here is an expansion of data fields on WordCamp.org user profiles and post types. Some of the data will be public, while some of it — like contact information — will be private.

There’s a few benefits to taking this approach:

  • We’ll reduce dependency on 3rd party services.
  • It makes WordCamp.org sites more “turn-key”. No fussing with other apps.
  • Data can be pulled into 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/ user profiles.

The fields proposed below are a starting point. They’re based on what we’ve used in spreadsheets at 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. Toronto over the last few years.

Let’s beat this up and make it better. 🙂

Continue reading

#wordcamps

New Authors

Some new people will be posting to this blog as we add more people in positions of responsibility, just wanted to give some context.

  • Andy McIlwain (@andymci, Toronto ON, Canada) is going to be taking a lead role in helping with the meetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. program, as anyone who’s followed the team chats might have already figured.
  • Cami Kaos (@camikaos, Portland OR, USA) handles the billing/payments, contracty stuff, cameras, swag, etc for our support of WordCamps and meetups, and will start postly weekly updates so we can increase transparency about things are run (not to mention so folks can appreciate how much work goes into that support).
  • Rebecca Collins (@rebeccaAC12, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia) has been handling conference sponsorships for Automattic for more than a year, and while a bunch of those events are done as Automattic, some are done as WordPress. She’ll start coordinating the WordPress events via this team so that people will know where we’ll be, and so we can coordinate local volunteers for tables/booths at relevant events.

Welcome, Andy, Cami, and Rebecca!

Profiles: A Sketch

Thank you to everyone who’s been leaving comments and suggestions on the thread from yesterday, and keep adding to that thread, I’ll be bookmarking it for continual review. 🙂 Anyway, here’s an update on this project.

This week Ian Dunn and Scott Reilly have been cranking out code, testing, hunting for the bugs, re-testing, etc. Mel Choyce and I have had our heads together on design, and Andrea Middleton and Cami Kaos have been heads down with volunteers on backfilling the WordCamp.org data for speakers and organizers*. We plan to launch something today, but it will definitely be a v1, and I’m proposing we (being whoever wants to work on it moving forward, not necessarily this specific group of people) work on iterations in 2-week cycles moving forward so that improvements (even small ones) are continually making the profiles better.

The way I’m looking at profiles from a ux perspective is that for a visitor, the profile serves as someone’s WP resume, while for the profile owner, it serves as the dashboard for their involvement in the 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. project. Based on that, here are the requirements for design:

  • No one’s profile should look sad and lonely because they are new to the project or currently inactive.
  • Seeing someone else’s profile should do the same thing as WordCamps, and help with the goal of our informal 3-word catchphrase (inspire*connect*contribute).
  • The first look when you land on a page should give you a sense of who someone is, and what their involvement level is.
  • It should be easy to see involvement by area/tasks, collections of things, activity in any part of 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/. Including both a big-river activity stream and breakout views would be the base of this, with an infinitely extensibleExtensible This is the ability to add additional functionality to the code. Plugins extend the WordPress core software. UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. to allow for adding more areas of activity as we start to connect them to the central profile.
  • Recognize contributors who are part of recognized contributor teams with a curated badge (vs pure quantity generating: imagine a forum volunteer and a spammy commenter/questioner both getting a badge saying they’re on the support team based on their activity numbers — yuck!). We’ll have to come up with a transparent metric for deciding what level/frequency of activity makes someone a ‘team member’ vs a contributor in that area. I’ll start checking in with each team and ask the team reps to help wrangle those decisions on a team-by-team basis.

So here’s the sketch I did yesterday for Ian to use as the starting point. Please take this in the spirit it’s offered; it’s just the working sketch/a set of ideas, and we’ll wind up with whatever we wind up with and then continue to iterate. So try not to get hung up on specifics yet. 🙂

Jen's sketch of profiles redux project v1

Jen’s sketch of profiles redux project v1

  • The top part serves as an overview for the person. Picture and user info is in the upper left, while the upper right is available for badges and special designations (like in this fake-nacin example, a custom status might say “Lead Developer” above the badges). If there is no activity, the picture and metadata will look like a nice digital business card with some lovely white space rather than a gaping, empty maw. Note it includes the join date that people have added from the forum profile, as well as more social media links, swiped from gravatarGravatar Is an acronym for Globally Recognized Avatar. It is the avatar system managed by WordPress.com, and used within the WordPress software. https://gravatar.com/. profiles. The badges are going to be done using dashicons on colored circle backgrounds to keep the wp logo branding style in play. Note: 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. speakers will be included in this, but the giant backlog of missing and/or nonexistent usernames will mean it takes a while to get those caught up.
  • The stats bar below the top will likely be v2 (esp since Scott is leaving today), but the idea is that it would highlight your areas of greatest activity/contribution. So if we identified say 20 potential stats that could go there, someone might have 5, or 3, or 10, or however many depending on how spread out their activity is. There would be no empty/0 counts. Someone with lots of docs activity would have different stats showing that someone who’s mostly in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. or WordCamps, for example. We talked about doing a cool graph or visual treatment, but we’ll consider that again later based on availability of people to make something like that.
  • Below the stat bar is the main content area. Here’s where it diverges — this sketch is layout A, which uses a left-hand nav/psuedo-tab approach to swap out the content in the main area. This is the layout I’m working on. Mel is working with Layout B, which has the same top part, but instead of separate sections to click on below, will put all the activity in one long screen. We’re going to use the same information/data and styling for both so that we can do a little A/B testing to see which layout approach people think is better/easier to use.

Some of the bits of data in the sketch don’t exist yet, but we’re going to work on adding them. The stats bar may have to wait until v2 for timing reasons. I’m pretty excited, though, and I think this will be a great improvement over what we have now. Look for a status update by the end of today or tomorrow at latest. Thanks!

*I spent a couple of hours doing this data backfill and it is TERRIBLE having to search all over google to find usernames and try them out only to find that really prominent people in the community who’ve spoken at multiple WCs don’t have a wordpress.org account at all. Makes me even more itchy for the next WC project, to have people log in/register at wordpress.org to buy a ticket, apply to speak, etc.

#official-websites, #profiles

Profiles: How Do You Use Them (or Want To?)

Hi all. As you know we’re working on a profiles update, and given all the new stuff it’ll include, it’ll get some new design as well. We’re trying to figure out what is most important to show in the default view, how to categorize sections/views, and in terms of layout, how to structure it so that no one’s profile looks like crap if they haven’t participated in much of anything yet. To that end, if you have a minute, can you comment with the answers to these questions? If you have time to ask some people you know and get their input as well, go for it. Thanks!

  • When you go to a 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/ profile, what are you looking for? If you go for multiple things, which are most important to you?
  • Is there information we don’t currently show in our profiles that you would find helpful?
  • Currently we have sections for Activity Stream (temporal information) and several “collections” of a person’s stuff (plugins and themes they’ve authored, plugins they’ve favorited, etc). Changes to items in a collection show up in the activity stream as well, but the collections are not tied to a temporal display. Does stream + collections make sense, or should the collection items just be part of the stream, or should they be separate but on the same view based on type, or do you have any other ideas on whether this distinction is useful or irrelevant? Any thoughts or ideas are worth sharing here.
  • Feel free to add any other new thoughts on profiles, but be prepared for us not to act on them in this week’s project given the timing. 🙂

Update: If you don’t know how to find the profile I’m talking about, it’s at https://profiles.wordpress.org/yourwordpressdotorgusername 🙂

#profiles

@sabreuse There hasn’t been a community team post…

@sabreuse: There hasn’t been a community team post over on /updates since January 31st, despite the fact that the past few weeks have been a flurry of activity for us. Are you still up for 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./updates? If your schedule’s gotten too busy, we can take updates off your plate for now and have someone else post them.

#team-rep, #updates

FYI we were accepted as a mentoring organization…

FYI, we were accepted as a mentoring organization for GSoC!

#gsoc, #gsoc2014

Andrea I have been working on offering post…

Andrea,

I have been working on offering post-production editing to WordCamps but have had limited success.

I have sent out prepaid return mailers and even sent SD cards with mailers but with little success. Videos seem to be a low priority once 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. is completed.

One issue I’ve had is when someone wants to upload the videos to me. I use Amazon AWS but I don’t want to give everyone access to my account.

These can be rather large files especially if the cameras run constantly between sessions.

Is there a resource in WordPress that can be used for raw videos to be uploaded by organizers so someone doing video editing can get access to them?

#wordpress-tv