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TrelloTrelloProject 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. for project management
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 meetupMeetupMeetup 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.
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 MeetupsMeetupMeetup 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. 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 metaMetaMeta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. 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 SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 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 WordCampWordCampWordCamps 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. 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
