Housekeeping: For All Deputies, Part I

Hey y’all. Time for one of those posts with a whole bunch of stuff that everyone ought to know, and some other stuff that needs your input. 🙂

In no particular order….

  • Cami is mostly focused on WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. from now until the end of the year, and will not be your go to person for payments as she has been in the past. Andrea and Josepha are taking point on the finances, and Cami will pitch in whenever she has a free moment in between WCUS planning. What this means for you: please let any WCs or 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. you are talking to know that payment requests should not be directed to Cami, but done through the payments 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 for WCs, or emailed to support@wordcamp.org for things like follow up or meetupMeetup 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. venues. Andrea and Josepha take care of these requests as they come in. If Cami is tagged on an email that is really a generic payment request email, please remove the Cami tag so others don’t think she needs to handle it personally.
  • Josepha is on vacation for the rest of this week. For finance stuff, see Andrea; for meetup stuff, see me.
  • Josepha says that @brandondove, @kcristiano, @miss_jwo, @andywashere, and @bph have been trained on meetups, but no one seems to be touching them. It would be helpful to know a) is that accurate, b) if so, is it because you don’t like handling meetups, because you feel like you need more training, or because you’re just too busy with WordCamps (or other stuff). I’m training more people on handling meetups this week, so if anyone wants more training or has questions about meetup applications, let me know.
  • MONEY. Our quest for a credit card program 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. organizers has been kiboshed due to last year’s finances being in the red. Bah! Andrea needs to look into the finances from last year with our bookkeeper, so next week she’ll be focused on that rather than overseeing organizers or deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook.. I’ll be around and Josepha will be back. Hopefully Andrea can get the $$ straightened out so we can move forward one way or another toward easier WC finances.
  • Speaking of money, it’s time for global sponsor invoices to go out again. Andrea will be taking this over, but unfortunately we don’t have good records from the past 3 quarters, so we’re getting those together now before she sends out invoices. (We’re a little late.) Of note, the issue around old multi-event billing vs new global billing caused a hiccup this year in terms of how much money we brought in. We need to take another look at how the $$ went this year and talk about what the sponsorship program should look like for 2016. While we are at it, I’d love to get rid of the sponsor level names that all basically mean ‘great’ and just label them with something that actually shows levels (1st, 2nd, 3rd; gold, silver, bronze, etc.). Once Andrea has gotten the financial records in readable order, she’ll post a summary of where we’re at and what we need moving forward. If anyone has thoughts about sponsor level names, take it away in the comments. 🙂
  • Tags. I notice that while a lot of supportpress email triage is being done (thank you, deputies!), tags are not being applied consistently. This is important because once something has any tags, people assume the tags tell the story, so if a thread still has old tags, or doesn’t have a tag stating what is needed next, the thread might get passed over by someone who could help. @kovshenin is putting the current list of tags into that empty left space in supportpress to make it easier to see what the tags are. @saurabhshukla also suggested it would be better to make them all plural vs singular for the sake of easier tagging, which makes sense (minus a few like swag, insurance). What do people think about adjusting the tags to be all plural (or all singular, for that matter)? Note: I started using a “chatter” tag today for stuff that was just “thank you!” “we sold out of tickets yay!” etc. But now that we’ve been tagging for a while, it would make sense to revisit the tags list and potentially add more tags to cover things we didn’t include the first time around — like email for setting up email accounts, etc. Want to suggest some new tags? Hit the comments!
  • Making spreadsheets public, both for our status docs, and budget docs for WCs. Aditya posted about sharing public ranges in August, but we haven’t started posting all those old budgets. It’s obviously not a top priority, but it’s a good downtime project for someone. If anyone wants to take point on that, volunteer in the comments and we can walk through what needs to happen there.
  • We have a proliferation of spreadsheets, budget docs, templates, etc. in a variety of folders. I’d like to create a more ordered folder system for this. Moving folders round shouldn’t affect bookmarks. Are people okay with me cleaning up the folder structure? Basically I’d like to make it so it follows the handbook breakdowns — a folder for general deputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. docs and tracking, a folder for wordcamps, a folder for meetups, etc. At least until we have a system that tracks all the community activity by location rather than type of activity.
  • Deputy training status/ebb and flow of availability. The last sheet on the WC status doc is Deputy Training Status, which I think we can all agree is not actually a WordCamp Status. 🙂 This doc/info deserves higher priority placement. I’d like to embed it into a page on this site. Additionally I’d like to add a column for people to be able to adjust a status for how available they are, so if say your WC is coming up and you need to step back for a month or two, you could change your status to Inactive or < 1 hour per week or whatever, so that as we look to see how many people are working on stuff, we can have a quick, realistic picture of who's doing what/who's available to train new deputies. It would also give more visibility to who is active on the team. Is that okay with everyone (putting that sheet on a make/community page)? There's no personal info like email address on that sheet, so it doesn't seem like there are any privacy issues. Weigh in below!

Oy. There's still more stuff on my list (Andrea and I met and made of "things we should really deal with and/or talk about with team" today), but I don't want to throw too much at everyone all at once, so I'll save some for another post. 🙂

Thanks!

#deputies, #community-management