Recap of the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training meeting on Nov 14, 2018

Attending: @jillbinder @miriamgoldman @angelasjin @webrite @simo70 @sheilagomes

Start time: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1542214858258200

Today’s Agenda:

  • Happy 1 year anniversary to us!
  • Celebrating Milan’s results! (featuring on next 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. newsletter)
  • Reports
  • What 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. cities/regions have you talked to about our project?
  • Discussion: Who is going to WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.? Meeting up and goals
  • Discussion: Phase 1 and Phase 2
  • Train the trainers ironing out details continuation

Happy 1 year anniversary!

A year ago yesterday I hit publish on the announcement of this group and call-out for volunteers:

Thanks to our group, our workshop has been run in 17 cities so far this year, 36 have been trained to run it, and 53 have expressed interest in 24 countries. And the year isn’t even over yet!

I’m really proud of us. Just last week I wrote up an article on HeroPress about how this group came to be, our celebrating 1 year, and what we’ve accomplished!

Celebrating Milan’s results! (featuring on next Meetups newsletter)

To explain what they’ve done, I’m going to show the feature I am thinking of sending to this month’s Meetups newsletter. In addition to celebrating, I’d love any feedback by the next couple of hours after our meeting.

As a note, so far the Meetups newsletters have been our best promotions. We typically get a few more signups after each one goes out.

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. Milan, Italy

We have had great success stories from folks who have taken our training and run our workshop. For our first region feature, we are highlighting WordCamp Milan!

Last year, they had 4 women speakers out of 19 (21%). They wanted to make a change this year. Simona Simionato took our training and started running our workshop live as well as online for those who couldn’t attend otherwise. She also posted on some digital female groups and personally contacted women in the community who potentially had interesting experiences to share and invited them to apply.

The results: They increased their speaker diversity at Meetups, which is important to build the roster of speakers for WordCamps. And for their WordCamp this year? There will be 11 women out of 21 speakers (52%!). One of them is also an LGBT community member. Nine of these speakers (of both genders) will be first-time speakers! Not only that….. but they had 45% speaker applications from women! Incredible!

“The workshop was useful in two ways: some people found the strength needed to overcome the fear of speaking in public, others simply a way to find topics (solving the ’I do not know what to say. issue)”

Would you like to know more and are you thinking about running the workshop? We’d like to hear from you!
https://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak

(I also have a note before that about this group and a link to our workshop material.)

Reports

@miriamgoldman

I ran a “train-the trainers” session on Saturday, and had five attendees – all very active in the chat room! No major new questions, but lots of commentary as we watched the video. Two of them joined the SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. group and have been added to the proper channel.

I’m also helping out with small tasks here and there, as my workload has permitted it.

@angelasjin

It has been pretty low key on my end, just a little HS triage every now and then.

@jillbinder Angela, you were very involved in October so pacing seems like a good idea before your next batch of big involvement.

What Meetup cities/regions have you talked to about our project?

We realized while looking through the spreadsheet of Meetups trying to find places who have run our workshop without our knowing, that there are a number who have gone ahead and done the work in other ways because they have heard of the work we’re doing and were inspired.

So we want to include in our year-end report how many cities/regions we’ve talked to.

Right now I have the number who have contacted us in total: 53!

I know that we’ve been talking to folks privately and at WordCamps, so it would be great to add those to our list.

Could you please send me as many cities as you can think of who you’ve talked to about our work?

Either check with our spreadsheet, or just send the list and we’ll cross-reference.

@miriamgoldman This year I’ve talked at Miami, Montreal, and Los Angeles about the project…and Ottawa is a given because well, I live here. I think last year I mentioned us to Rochester?

@simo70 I’ve talked of the project during my speech at WordCamp Verona

@angelasjin I’ve talked about it with folks in NYC, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland. I’ve mentioned the training to folks from Phoenix, Austin, Montreal, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, Santa Clarita.

Who is going to WCUS?

@angelasjin I will be there! So excited

@jillbinder I will be there!

I’d love to organize a meetup for our group for anyone who will be there so we can meet.

And also I’d like to chat about our WCUS goals.

For those of us who are there, if you have the time, these are the goals I am thinking of:

  • Talk to as many folks at Community Bazaar as we can. Meetups are represented there, and I got quite a few of them interested in our work at the Bazaar last year
  • Talk about our project when you’re networking and in the sessions where it’s related. It’s a great place to get more interest in what we’re doing!

Last year I held the first Train the Trainers on Contrib Day. This year I won’t be able to attend Contrib Day. I also don’t think it’s as vital as now we are running it regularly as the group online. That doubled as a kick-off to get more volunteers in the group as well.

For those who are there on Contrib Day, though, I have ideas for a couple of projects we can add to Community team.

I want to be mindful that we’re sticking to Phase 1 items (more on that later) so that we’re not adding too much to our plates before it is time.

I learned from WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. that the more we add on that day, the more follow-up work there is. And until I get sponsorships to do this work, my bandwidth is limited.

So my ideas are:
– Editing our training video. (I have the notes and times already done.)
(Possibly getting someone on the WordPress.tv team involved.)
– Make our workflow diagram look nicer (and still be editable)

Although right now @miriamgoldman and I are doing up a new version of that workflow diagram, so that may not be needed. We’ll see.

I’m also open to other ideas of what we could have Community Team working on with/for us. Easy tasks that new folk could work on are best for Contrib Day. Although we could also take advantage of the team’s wealth of knowledge.

@angelasjin I’m going to be volunteering at WCUS, so my time is going to be limited, but I definitely plan on talking to folks about this working group and the training at the very least!

Phase 1 and Phase 2

As I mentioned last time, it’s important for us to get a clear sense of when we can call Phase 1 of our project done. Then for Phase 2 either I’ll get funding to be able to keep leading or co-leading, or we’ll be recruiting a new leader.

I think we are very close to being able to call Phase 1 done. My current goal in my head is wrapping it by Dec 31, 2018.

Phase 1

I think we need to:

  • Iron out the basic, essential details for our Train the Trainers sessions.

Things we are looking at:

  • Sending out a follow-up email questionnaire (which is finally composed and @dianewallace has started sending out last week!)
  • Keeping our scheduled trainings doc up to date: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v0EsrRLXTXr579kDjFE2DmeEeFKpsCxMYyqkUQaC5wg/edit?usp=sharing
  • Creating a good Helpscout workflow, including our system for Dormant emails
  • Having a solid pre- and post-train the trainers checklist

Some items that we are working on now but aren’t essential for Phase 1:

  • Event signups and reminders
  • A system for those who don’t have their own Zoom accounts
  • A place to keep all our docs

Also, not related to Train the Trainers but rather related to our main workshop:

  • Posting our “How to run 5 lessons in 4 hours” document somewhere

Those are my thoughts right now. We’re quite close!

@sheilagomes Sorry, it’s been a long time I was here last, but where’s this “How to run 5 lessons in 4 hours” doc?

@jillbinder Right now it’s in a private Google document. It’s for those who want to run all 5 modules in an afternoon, we have a suggested timeline written out.

For Phase 2, I have written down a wish list of everything I could think of. I’m sure it won’t be all these things. Those leading Phase 2 can decide what is really important.

Phase 2

Would love to hear your thoughts on this Wish List

Main Workshop:

  • Implement and test improvements suggested in the follow-up email questionnaire we’re sending out
  • Implement and test improvements to the main workshop material that are in my brain (bios, outlines, “uh”, some instructions needed, a repeating section)
  • Work with Training team to fix the little logistical details
  • Test current slides
  • Slide deck playlists? Do we need?
  • Adding to the speaker lessons: How to use, how to create lessons playlist
  • Little logistical details of the speaker series lessons
  • Translations
  • Coordinating with Training team how the translations happen
  • Figure out our system to have designated gatekeepers approve or deny changes to the workshop material.

Train the Trainers workshop:

  • Work with the WordPress Training team to design and test a better, sustainable, scaleable, easier to understand “train the trainer” curriculum for training the Meetups to do our workshop
  • Creating a Q&A system that is more robust and searchable
  • Figure out our system to have designated gatekeepers approve or deny changes to the workshop material.

Our team:

More folks running Meetings, doing Meeting recapsCo-leaders (maybe also new leader… still determining my plans for next year)

Promotions:

  • More promotions: articles, blogs, videos, etc. and keeping better track of what has been done
  • Promote my Seattle 2017 WordCamp talk

Important Other:

  • Get sponsor(s) for Meetups’ venue and other costs who are running our workshop
  • Article on how to get more diverse folks to come out to meetups
  • Connecting with related groups to see how we can help each other

This is my “ideal” list. I think it’ll be more like a starting point of ideas for Phase 2.

Idea I just thought of right now:

Phase 1 was simplified when I cut out anything that didn’t support our main goal. Maybe what’s most useful is creating a new main goal for Phase 2. And then the leadership can choose to do only what supports that.

I’ll toss out a couple of ideas for all to mull over and we can continue this next time….

Right now our goal was 27 meetups have run it this year. (Even though it’s unlikely we’ll meet that, we’ve had 17 so far and we will certainly have more by the end of the year, so I’m still calling it a success…)

I think for next year we should pick how many we want to train, how many we want to have run it, and then create the systems that support sustaining and growth.

@sheilagomes So, I have this article I wrote in Portuguese that I can translate to English, talking about the workshop done in the last WordCamp São Paulo. It kind of breaks the workshop down for people to know what it’s about and what is typically done, incuding the motivations and expectations we have with the workshop. I’ll translate it by the end of this week and send it to you, then you let me know what you think. It’ll need to be proofread anyway.

Train the trainers ironing out details continuation

These are the things we are working on currently, as far as I know.

  • Q&A doc
  • Event signups and reminders
  • Pre and post checklist
  • Email questionnaire
  • Keep our doc up to date: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v0EsrRLXTXr579kDjFE2DmeEeFKpsCxMYyqkUQaC5wg/edit?usp=sharing
  • I share my zoom account
  • Dormants

Any quick thoughts since our last meeting about any of these that we could do now?

Ok we can chat between meetings or in our next meeting.

@sheilagomes I’m a bit lost right now, not having participated in the last months’ meetings.

@jillbinder You rejoined in a meeting where I’m throwing in everything!  Here is a P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. post to help people catch up to where we are quickly. We are still where this doc says we are, we are just in some of the details of it now.

Diversity Speaker Outreach Training Group Onboarding / Summary

Thanks again team! I’m proud of our work.

Next Actions

  1. Everyone: Please send me feedback in the next couple of hours about the feture for the Meetups newsletter.
  2. Everyone: Please send me which cities/regions you’ve talked to about our work
  3. @miriamgoldman is sending me the Google doc of our workflow later this week
  4. Everyone: Please send me your thoughts on Phase 1 items, Phase 2 items, and Phase 2 overall goals.
  5. @sheilagomes is sending me her article by end of this week to proofread and decide how we can use it.
  6. Are you going to WCUS? Let me know!

#wpwomenspeak

End time: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1542218631347600

#wpdiversity