Recap of the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training meeting on June 26, 2019

Attending: @jillbinder @angelasjin @cguntur @amyjune @rahuldsarker

Start: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1561568532050800

Agenda

  • Reports
  • Announcement from Automattic of my sponsorship for this work
  • My video
  • Current stats
  • Where we’re at with the first train the trainers today
  • Test and recording with team
  • Update on Translations
  • Where we’re at in our roadmap

Reports

(Includes folks who sent me their reports ahead of time.)

@miriamgoldman
I’m holding a train the trainers this afternoon.

@angelasjin
I think I need to schedule a train the trainers session for August? I need to sort out my schedule (I’ll get there) and would like to confer with other trainers to see what time would be most effective. And I recall some updating of our trainings, but I’m a bit behind on what that looks like.

@cguntur
I am planning to attend the train the trainers session this afternoon!

@simo70
The Verona 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. went well. I talked about myths, how to find an idea, write a bio and make good slides. I could not continue with the Italian translations.

@aurooba
I don’t have an update on marketing stuff as of right now.

@rahuldsarker
Rahul joined the team in our meeting today and has 10 hours a week to contribute. Welcome!

Announcement from Automattic of my sponsorship for this work

It is now officially public knowledge: Automattic posted last week about supporting this work with giving me a 50% sponsorship to lead the team!

Want to See a More Diverse WordPress Contributor Community? So Do We.

Also Matt posted about it on his blog, and I am so happy about that too:

Diversifying WordPress

My video

I have a video about the impact that this work has. It is promoting my new business to take this work outside of WordPress, but everything up until the end is all about this project. It’s only 3 min so give it a watch to see what we’ve accomplished. It is mighty impressive!

Current stats

As we are having our first train the trainers since the reboot this afternoon, I thought I’d share where our stats are before that. We did have the team going for the first couple of months in the year, so that is where these come from.

We trained 5 cities:

  • Ahmedabad, India
  • Torino, Italy
  • Sevilla, Spain
  • Portland (I think?), USA
  • Milan, Italy

4 cities have run the training:

  • Torino, Italy
  • Portland (I think?), USA
  • Milan, Italy
  • Vancouver, BC

It’s a solid start. With our new processes that’ll make everything easier and with @aurooba heading up our marketing (with the help of the #marketing team), we are going to be doing a lot more.

Where we’re at with Train the Trainers

For those who are new, Train the Trainers is where we walk chapter meetup organizers through our workshop material. We were running them 1-2 times a month and starting today we are doing them again at about this schedule.

We currently have one scheduled for June. That is later today at 5-7pm Eastern time.

You can still sign up for it by going to https://tiny.cc/wpdiversity

It was my intention to get the new processes started before today’s training.

What is done:

A couple of new fields on the form. We want to have people book a training after they have scheduled a workshop at their meetup. In the future we’ll have more info so that they can decide they want to do it and create their meetup in advance. As we don’t have that in place yet, I put the fields in but optionally for now.

What isn’t done:

I wanted to have our calendly ready to test out people choosing a training with it, and seeing how it does with sending out the various reminders and info. But it turns out I needed people who own that account to do things to set me up, and 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. Europe got in the way of that. So I’ll be able to talk to the person who can help me today and get that going.

Test and recording with team

While I’m putting together the “long” and “short” versions of the workshop, I’ve been working on smoothing out the workshop material. I would like to test out a new “writing your biography” exercise.

I would like help from 6 folks on Zoom calls with me sometime in the next couple of weeks, please. Three to test old way and then new way
and three to test new way and then old way.

Let me know here or in the comments of the recap if you can do this, please!

Volunteered in the meeting: @cguntur, @angelasjin, @amyjune

And on recording

This is a long heads-up that in a few months (I need to check when on the roadmap) as part of the new Train the Trainers to teach the new, easier workshop, I will want to have a recording of people taking the workshop that 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. can watch.

And I would like as many members of our group to be on that, please. Partly so that we’ve all taken it, and partly because it’ll be a great contribution to the project.

It’ll likely be two 2-hour sessions, each a week apart.

I will send out a scheduling poll to us soon for the full workshop sessions so that we can have folks schedule around being able to attend.

Update on Translations

Quick update on Translations. Our mini Translations team is no longer available to do the speaker training workshop and train the trainers translations into other languages.

But the good news is, we have an entire WordPress team available to us to pick it up. The #polyglots team.

So I will:

  • reach out to that team soon
  • start communicating now what our needs will be in a couple of months when the long and short workshops are available
  • check in on what kind of schedule they would like re: how many translations over how many months

I would love to have a co-lead for communicating with #polyglots about Translations with me. Who would be willing do this ongoing project with me?

@rahuldsarker
I can translate to Bangali, our local language.

Where we’re at in our roadmap

I think I was overeager when I created the June plan, and so not all is done. June isn’t over and there is time to do more! but I will update where each item is at.

[Material] Improving the training based on the feedback from email questionnaires and things Jill has learned

Yes – I am doing this on the future long and short workshops. But I also want to get essential items into the current workshop and I haven’t done that yet.

fyi we have a new team member, @incredimike, who is going to do the githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ requests on the #training team’s system for these changes.

[Promotion] Create a shorter team name

Done! Woohoo!
[Team] Publish roadmap; Recruit more volunteers

Roadmap published and it included the call out for volunteers. We’ve had a few new since then!
[Trainers] Get us using new systems (calendly, require they’ve created a meetup for it, email questionnaire)

This was ambitious and not yet done. I hope to get calendly going this week. The other 2 are big jobs.
[Trainers] Schedule first new training(s) starting in June

Yes! @miriamgoldman is doing one later today. :thumbsup:
[Trainers] Start giving trainings again, 1-2 times a month

Yes, and we need to schedule out for July and August. Right now I think we have 2 active trainers, @miriamgoldman and @angelasjin. I can jump in as needed. We have a few more folks who are wanting to be trainers, so let’s get them ready soon.

It’s a bit tricky while we’re in the middle of changing our processes, but we’ll see what we can do.

Miriam and Angela, you might be needed a bit more frequently in the next couple of months before we get more folks on board.
I’ll chat with you both out of the meeting.
[Trainers] Jill record a short video on what this is

Ambitious and not yet done.
[Andrea, Jill, Trainers / Promotion] Create new email questionnaire follow-up system and/or Zoom interviews; Send it out to previous facilitators; Start collecting case studies for marketing ?

Very ambitious and not yet done.

That is the June list!

@angelasjin: That’s a really ambitious list, and even though everything isn’t checked off, a lot of great work was done! So, awesome job!

Upcoming items on the roadmap:

June – July

[Translations] Translating the workshop and materials to Brazilian Portuguese and Italian
[Trainers] Contact past attendees and dormant emails (not responded in several months) to let the new speaker wranglers this year know about workshop and see if they’d like training
[Trainers] Contact past attendees to see if they’d like to take it again
[Trainers] Contact past attendees for their info for the “Past Workshops Celebration” page
[Jill] Communication and accountability system

July

[Promotion] Jill finish Build Speaker Roster essay
[Promotion] Put the workshop into the materials for WordCamp Speaker wranglers and the Meetups info
[Training, Promotion] Create a “Past Workshops Celebration” page on Make WordPress that shows images, stats, and maybe stories of each workshop

The ongoing items are going well.

Except that I missed the June newsletter workshop deadline by a bit and so they didn’t publish the new testimonial and info about today’s training. We have sorted out a system so that that won’t happen again next month.

Next Actions

  1. All on team, watch my 3 min video to see the impressive work we’ve done so far. (Ignore the end that is promo for taking the work outside of WordPress.) https://diversein.tech/video/
  2. Anyone on our team or any meetup organizers can still sign up for the Train the Trainers later today at 5-7pm Eastern time. https://tiny.cc/wpdiversity
  3. Jill finishing calendly setup this week.
  4. I need 6 volunteers to do a one-hour call with me to test the new biography exercise. Three signed up today. Three more please!
  5. Jill schedule the biography testing calls with the volunteers.
  6. Jill create poll to schedule when as many people as possible on our team can attend a recording session of our whole workshop to use in our training material. Aiming for September.
  7. I would love to have a co-lead for communicating with #polyglots about Translations with me. Who would be willing do this ongoing project with me?
  8. Translations follow up with @rahuldsarker about future Bangali translation
  9. Jill talk to @miriamgoldman and @angelasjin about upcoming Training schedule
  10. Training team talk about onboarding the rest of future Trainers

End: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1561571805113300

#wpdiversity