Proposal: Dedicated communication place for deputies

For some time I’ve personally have felt that deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. would need another place than #community-team 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/. channel to discuss some topics. Mary’s proposal about monthly virtual calls is a great one to create a place for deputies to see each other and share how they are, though it has a slightly different function than I’m proposing here.

To keep it short, my few arguments why deputies would need dedicated channel:

1) We have 51 active deputies and the #community-team channel has over 1 500 members

2) During exceptional situations, like recent COVID-19 response and things caused by that, deputies needed to communicate realtime a lot while working with fast actions to help organisers. And in other hand, deputies stepping in to help with the response work needed to get (at that point) internal instructions. Sharing and creating internal instructions on a channel that has over 1 500 members, means that community members will see an incomplete and in some cases information that is subject to change. This means that #community-team channel is not space place for deputies to draft some posts, changes and guidelines in urgent or controversial situations.

3) Currently, some discussion that is internal for deputies for a reason or another (like how to respond in sudden situations/cases, how to handle this thing we haven’t faced before or issues that are delicate) are hepping in small(ish) deputyProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. DM groups. For transparency this is bad.

4) The dedicated channel could encourage deputies to ask help when they need it during their work.

This is why I’m proposing: creating a new private channel for active deputies. Active deputies would be defined based on this deputy sheet we have.

Yes, the private channel is somewhat against the transparency we as a team and as a project in general cherish. At the same time, it should be remembered that some discussions that could involve all deputies happen in smaller DM groups. Creating a private channel for all deputies would hopefully reduce the need for that kind of DM groups and add transparency amongst deputies.

Also, the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team has a private channel for some discussions mainly related to releasing new versions, because it’s more convenient to have a smaller channel instead of trying to have the discussion in the public channel where a lot of conversation happens. (Someone who is more familiar with the Core team can correct me if I’m wrong).

And the last argument in favour of the private channel is that we are already good in directing discussion from Slack to 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/. when needed, so why we wouldn’t be good on moving some discussion from a private channel to public #community-team if the topic is something that can be discussed publicly.

When pitching this idea to some members of our deputy team, it got objections and a counter-proposal of creating new public channel for this purpose.

Please leave your feedback on the topic and particularly in the following questions:

  1. Should deputies have another place than the #community-team channel to discuss among themselves if needed?
  2. If deputies should have a dedicated channel, should it be private or public?

Leave your feedback on 2020-07-31 latest.