Proposal: New content in the meetup organizer newsletter

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This is the home of the Make Community team for the WordPress 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!

Here is where we have policy debates, project announcements, and assist community members in organizing events.

Everyone is welcome to comment on posts and participate in the discussions regardless of skill level or experience.

We did a great job of sending consistent monthly newsletters to 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. 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 dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-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 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/., 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!

Timi Wahalahti 7:19 am on February 15, 2019

To refresh the memory, all teams are listed here.

1. Yes it does!
2. I’d love to see tips for how to grow the 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. group by marketing it in different ways
3. (community) metaMeta Meta 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. and meta in general, polyglots, accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), support, design, marketing, themes and docs. Others are a bit hard IMO because their work is so specific or above the intermediate-level. Ok to be fair, meta is also above it, but I’d really really would love to promote their work because it is so valuable to the project as a whole.
4. A small thing that hit me while reading last newsletter, there’s no mention about our office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time..

In general, I think newsletters have been very good, thank you all who have been facilitating those and suggested the content!
Hugh Lashbrooke 11:39 am on February 15, 2019

1. Yes – love it.
2. Would be good to see some content on getting co-organisers to work with you – I know that’s something that a lot of 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. organisers struggle with.
3. All of the teams! Even if a team is “harder” to get into in terms of the work that they do, it’s still worth highlighting them.
4. Agree with @sippis about mentioning our office hoursOffice Hours Defined times when the Global Community Team are in the #community-events Slack channel. If there is anything you would like to discuss – you do not need to inform them in advance.You are very welcome to drop into any of the Community Team Slack channels at any time.. I’d also like to see some content about do_actiondo_action do_action hackathons are community-organised events that are focussed on using WordPress to give deserving charitable organisations their own online presence. Learn more on doaction.org. events in there to get the word out about them more.
- Timi Wahalahti 11:49 am on February 15, 2019
  
  Even if a team is “harder” to get into in terms of the work that they do, it’s still worth highlighting them.
  
  Totally agree with this! We can’t know what kind of people are getting the newsletter, there might be one or few who can start contributing to the “harder” team straight away. And even there wouldn’t be, it is important to highlight every team as their contributions to the WordPress project as a whole are valuable.
Sam Suresh 12:46 am on February 26, 2019

Idea/Suggestion: We can have a 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. Highlight of the month. Every month highlight one meetup. Something like this: https://2018.us.wordcamp.org/2018/08/13/community-spotlight-kuala-lumpur-malaysia/

This will motivate / inspire other meetup organizers.
Sandy Edwards 8:18 pm on March 7, 2019

Idea suggestion: A blip about getting kids involved in your community/WordCamps.
Francesca Marano 3:32 pm on July 4, 2019

Yes please 🙂
I also will resume the 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. organisers monthly chats in September 2019, January 2020 at the latest, but I need to think about it a bit more and I need to think about how the information we discuss in the monthly chat can be shared 🙂