This is the home of the Make Community team for the WordPress open sourceOpen SourceOpen 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.
Get Involved
If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!
Chatting about what you’re working on for the team, how it’s going, any obstacles, with colours:
– Green: on plan. No help needed.
– Yellow: not on plan but I have a strategy to get there
– Red: not on plan, no plan to get there, I’m lost!
New ongoing role needed to be filled. Needs title. Someone who loves connections, people, communication, transformation, and data!
Invitation to our practise WCUSWCUSWordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. workshop on Oct 6 on Creating A Welcoming And Diverse Space for your online or in person community.
Reminder headphones, mic, and good internet needed for our internal, recorded training Oct 26 & 27.
Open discussion
1. Reports!
Chatting about what you’re working on for the team, how it’s going, any obstacles, with colours: – Green: on plan. No help needed. – Yellow: not on plan but I have a strategy to get there – Red: not on plan, no plan to get there, I’m lost!
@rahuldsarker
I had a brief conversation with the team about translation.
@cguntur
I am still waiting for Jeremy to get back to me. He said he will be back by the end of September (end of this week I think). I am going to pingPingThe act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” him over the weekend or Monday to get his details for the speaker mentorEvent SupporterEvent Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues. program. @jillbinder I have to add his info to the resources page before I can send it over for your review after I have his info.
@miriamgoldman
Green: Finished video edit and Google Doc with more prompts
Green: Training later today, I have one individual
Green: Checklist written out analog for the train the trainers process, need to put it digitally
Green: Keeping an eye out on Helpscout every day or second day
Green: We’ll be discussing the communications role that will help myself and others later on in the meeting
@amyjune
Waiting for assets from @jillbinder for BADcamp training and will be reviewing with Tara before camp
2. Monthly Check-Ins
I love our team so much. I love the direct, tangible, huge impact we are already making and are continuing to make, in WordPress and beyond.
The items that you’re each doing are an important contribution to our focus at present: improving our current processes and scaling up to reach more 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.. So that it’s easier for us, for them, and we can make an even bigger difference!
Also, one of the benefits of volunteering in the WordPress space is getting to try new skills, make mistakes, and grow. It’s a safe place for this.
Gosh knows how much I have grown in this space. It’s literally where a few of us tried out the workshop concept, from there I started public speaking more, doing more workshops, am growing my skills in leadership, and now am doing this work full-time.
There is so much opportunity.
With that in mind, I’d love to create an environment on our team where we say we’re going to do something and we stay in communication about how it’s going.
It’s an amazing way to grow and learn, and also with increased accountability fewer things will fall through the cracks. People can jump in, we can help each other figure out solutions to obstacles, we can jump in and help each other, etc.
So what I’d like to start doing is hearing from team leads what they think they and their teams can realistically accomplish over the next month (a whole skill in itself that I’m always practising!) and then how it went.
I’m liking the colour system a lot! I just want to give it a little more structure and accountability.
At the start of a month, I’d like to hear from everyone their next month’s tasks. Choose things that forward your projects and our team’s mission, and put these in the month in 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.. Feel free to request help from me or our team. If you don’t, I will assume you’ve got it! Let me know when you’ve done so so I can review and make sure we’re all using our precious time to the best use. I’m a big believer in high impact tasks that have an impact on our goals, and I can help you with this!
I’m going to start asking team leads if they can try to attend at least one of our team meetings a month. (The meeting that we’re in now.) I’d like myself and the team to hear from you your report on how your month’s Trello items are going and anything else that’s come up. If you can’t attend in a month, it’s ok! You can let me know how you’re doing in another way, like:
Comment on our P2P2P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/.
If you communicate it with the team, that gives everyone the chance to celebrate, help you with obstacles, and maybe even jump in to help. We’re all in this together!
You can also let me know if you prefer more or less guidance/contact. I know different people have different preferences for management styles. (Monthly is my personal preference!)
This is part of my own leadership growth. Learning to balance working on my items and helping you do your best and learn and grow with your items, while we all continue our amazing forward trajectory with our team’s high successes.
3. A new, ongoing role!
It is great for someone who has a few hours a week for the role. Honestly it’ll be very minimal for the next few months until we’ve finished more processes and also scaled up to reach more meetups, and then it will be busier. It may even next year be so busy that you could be leading a mini team to cover it… So lots of opportunity for growth in this one!
It needs a title… more on that in a moment.
First, it’s great for someone who loves connections, people, communication, transformation, and data!
On our Train the Trainers team, we want someone who will care for the meetups who reach out to us, from beginning to end. From first contact to when (in the future) we have follow-up questionnaires.
It would be checking Helpscout a few times a week, communicating with the meetups who contact us, make sure no one falls through the cracks, make sure they feel well cared for. Make sure that we are tracking them properly in our spreadsheet.
You get to witness their community’s transformation!
My first idea for title was Communications Manager, but that means something else.
Connections something
Happiness something (haha)
@miriamgoldman and I are reaching out first to our team to see if anyone wants to jump at the chance, and if no one does, it’s no problem. We’ll do a call-out for it on the Make Community P2.
@miriamgoldman
I’ll be providing help to anyone who wants to take on this role – you’ll be helping me out as I’m growing my own team!
@jillbinder
Also, if anyone loves this role and wishes they could do it instead of their current role, we can talk about that too!
@cguntur
Since I check HelpScout everyday, I can definitely do this. Currently, the other stuff I am working on does not need much of my time. I might need some help later though….
@jillbinder @cguntur That would be amazing! Let’s set up a time for you, @miriamgoldman, and I to talk more.
Once it becomes too much, we can talk about you leading the team of people who do it, or some other strategy we come up with at the time based on your situation and wants. If you still want it after we chat. Let’s have the exploratory convo first.
4. Invitation to my WCUS workshop team’s practise workshop on Oct 6.
Many of us were drawn to the #WPDiversity team because you wanted to help your own community. So I think many of you will be very interested in this workshop!
Creating A Welcoming And Diverse Space for your online or in person community.
Speakers is just one piece of the puzzle. We are going to talk about that and 4 other elements:
Mindset
Community
Space
Allyship
It’ll be hands-on and interactive. You’ll walk away with items you can start implementing right away.
You’ll also be helping us out. We are looking for:
The chance to rehearse our workshop with folks who will actively participate with our interactive exercises.
Feedback on what worked,what could be improved, and what felt missing.
Suggestions for our diversity and inclusion content.
@miriamgoldman
I’ll be travelling back from 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. Rochester with Matt Graham and Shanta, so I’m not sure how good our connection will be, and where along the road we’ll be. (I have a 7PM train to connect to in Oshawa that night!) But, I think we said we’d try, but be audio only.
@jillbinder
Trying is great, @miriamgoldman! Can you sign up on the page with your maybe?
Best if you’ll be able to download our workbook ahead of time and at least one person in the car is able to read that…. but it’s still helpful to us even if you can’t do the exercises, just giving us people to practise with and maybe feedback on content.
@cguntur
I can also try… not sure if I can make it
5. Reminder of our team’s training of our workshop material Oct 26 & 27.
We are going to be recording it for our new Train the Trainers material. In the last recording, the participants were hard to hear. So please:
Wear headphones
Use a microphone or headset if you can
Be on good wifi
5. Open Discussion
Anything on your mind relating to our team that you’d like to bring up?
@miriamgoldman
Nope. Like I said, next weekend I’m at WordCamp Rochester, and while I won’t have time in my presentation, I’ll try and bring up our team at the afterparty/speaker dinner and stuff.
And same with WordCamp Niagara two weeks after that.
@jillbinder Sounds good — thanks for promoting us where you can, @miriamgoldman!
(I also have a suggestion for where to fit it in quickly in a presentation…. @cguntur and I have been talking about this for her presentation that has nothing to do with our team….. Let me know if you’d like to hear that.)
@jillbinder
We have another promotion article on WP Tavern. @pollyplummer interviewed me about the work our team does, the WCUS workshop coming up, and my thoughts on the European PHPPHPPHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. Conference cancelation….!
@jillbinder
Thank you for everything you’re doing and going to be doing, and thank you in advance for doing the tweaks to our team’s communication strategy!