Welcome to the official blog of the community/outreach team for the WordPress open source project!
This team oversees official events, mentorship programs, diversity initiatives, contributor outreach, and other ways of growing our community.
If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!
Getting Involved
We use this blog for policy debates, project announcements, and status reports. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to comment on posts and join the discussion.
You can learn about our current activities on the Team Projects page. These projects are suitable for everyone from newcomers to WordPress community elders.
You can use our contact form to volunteer for one of our projects.
We also have regular Community Team meetings on the first and third Thursdays of every month at 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC in #community-team on Slack (same agenda).
Office hours are usually quite quiet, people ask their questions when it’s convenient for them and deputies forgot to open or close those (regardless of the bot we have to remind us). There is almost always deputy to answer questions or if there isn’t, the question will be caught up later when some deputy sees it.
So, I’d like to question if community hours are really needed and propose their retirement. In exchange there are few things we could do to encourage people to ask questions freely.
During the last community team meetings, few good ideas were conducted from the discussion:
replace the office hours sidebar and welcome box text with something more general about #community-events channel and encouraging to ask questions at all times
having a random empathy bot that reminds #community-team that we should post something encouraging to #community-events if the channel has been quiet for some time
Some concerns were also raised:
some people are waiting for the office hours before asking their questions
we don’t want to loose a human touch so having a bot in #community-events opening/closing office hours, sending random reminder messages or auto-replying is not an option
we need to be very clear that people can ask their questions any time, but know that they may not get an immediate answer
Please share your thoughts about retiring office hours or ideas on how to evolve those! Comments will close 10.4., please leave your comment before that.
Create a Process for Documentation Create KidsCamp Documentation Create Kids Workshop Documentation Create Kids Club Documentation Create Volunteer Guides Create Legal Document Repo Create Supplies List with Amazon Smile Links (to benefit WordPress Foundation) Create a Guide for Marketing Kids Events to Schools
The goal is to spend about 12 months creating, documenting and polishing the documents and then creating a repo with the Training Team. That will mean a liaison will be needed as some point as well.
@melindahelt When I was helping with the training team and we were starting lesson plans, we had a master list of plans we needed, and people volunteered to write (and then edit and test) each of those pieces. If someone had a suggestion not on the list, we were very open to that as well, but having the list was easy for a new person to come and review the list an pick something they enjoyed/had knowledge about
Kinda like when someone is dealing with an illness and everyone says “what can I do to help” and… often nothing gets done, but if you say “I need A, B, and C” then people step up
@melindahelt I think it’s important to note that everyone can still be involved if they can’t make the meetings – keeping track of chit chat in this channel between meetings will be difficult, but we can use P2 post (blog posts on the make.wordpress.org site) to keep track of things and communicate
@sunsand187 Yes that is 100% on point. I know not everyone is in the slack channels too. If there is no other thoughts or comments we can wrap up this meeting and reconvene on the 7th :slightly_smiling_face: I will post a recap on the community blog (P2).
Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!
Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in Slack and ask for help!
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 meetup
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 Meetups 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 meta 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 Slack 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 WordCamp 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
Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!
Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in Slack and ask for help!
To kick off the new year with new goals, we had a great video chat this last weekend.
We talked about where we’ve been, what items we want to maintain, where we want to improve, how we want to grow.
What We Covered and Discussed
Last Year
Ran 15 trainings
Trained 45 meetups
16 ran our workshop (as far as we know)
In the first year of running it (last year or previously) there were incredible results: Typically from 10% to 50% women speakers at their next WordCamp
We tracked speaking by email or in person with 55 meetups in 26 countries
It was fulfilling: “I’ve really enjoyed the work we do in this working group, and can see its impact. It is super inspirational!” -Angela Jin Community Organizer at Automattic
We Are Here
We have the workshop
We have a message and a form
The Train The Trainers team runs 1-2 trainings a month
We have a (good enough for now) training video
Most of our interest comes from:
The monthly Meetups newsletter
Talking with folks at WordCamps
Motivated team members who run them in different cities
Where We Are Headed
In 2018: 16 meetups* (* plus non-meetups
By end of 2020: 100+ meetups a year (There are 700+ meetups (800+?))
I’m working with a project manager classmate at my business school to work out how to improve our communication and results. These are the mock-ups we came up with for a future project management system:
Our First Steps
Putting the workshop into the materials for WordCamp Speaker wranglers
Putting the workshop into Meetups info
Changing our name, hashtag, and how we refer to our pieces (Jamie!)
Train the Trainers work on our processes
Reaching out to dormants and those who ran it last year
@JillBinder is putting out a doodle poll for a Train The Trainers zoom call
@MiriamGoldman is creating a Trainers onboarding meeting
@MiriamGoldman is writing up her journey and a testimonial tomorrow
@JillBinder is putting together who volunteered with which roles @Simo70 when you volunteered to do trainings in Italian, was that the main workshop or the Train The Trainers?
@SheilaGomes and I talk about translating newsletters, before I submit the next one around February 10
Everyone new & returning please fill out the welcome form: https://jill249.typeform.com/to/Ye0NIe (edited)
Any reports people have on what they’ve been working on
Looking at the project management dashboard I’ve started up
Following up from the Zoom meeting
Open discussion to help people get started on their projects with feedback/discussion from the team
If time, discussing a question I have on slides
Reports
Does anyone have anything to report on what they’ve been working on, what’s going well, where they’re blocked, etc.?
@jillbinder I’m pleased to report that WC Torino (in Italy) is running the workshop this week. They may be the first ones to be running it this year! @francina who has been a wonderful supporter of our work all along is leading that.
@jillbinder Tonight! We’re looking forward to hearing how it went after, @francina. We even have a follow-up questionnaire.
@miriamgoldman
I’m getting ready to run a train the trainers session on Sunday. Gotta go into Helpscout and send out the info. Then will be writing my blog post and testimonial.
We had a really great video chat to kick off the year this last weekend.
We talked about where we’ve been, what items we want to maintain, where we want to improve, how we want to grow.
I’m hoping to get the recap for that up on the Community blog this week.
One of the items I talked about was how a classmate at my business school is helping me figure out project management. We decided to start with a Google spreadsheet, and then once our team has got a sense of what our needs are, we can pick a project management tool. Possibly with help from him, @jamieschmid who offered to help, and others. Trello was mentioned a lot on the call, and we’ll see if it can fit.
As of last night, we now have the start of this dashboard up.
Downsides to current version: I don’t know if we can get it to send people emails (or if we even should?).
Upsides: We can move the workshop tracking sheet over to a tab of this document and have it automagically fill in our KPI (key performance indicator) results, like how many have contacted us, how many we’ve trained, how many have run it.
Everything is experiments. We don’t know what works until we try it….
(Though if someone sees something I’m going to try and knows it won’t work and has a better way, I am totally open to that.)
The dashboard is split into our subprojects / subteams. Each one has its own KPI.
Also, I combined the “Action sheet” that I talked about into this same doc so we won’t need to go back and forth.
Any initial thoughts or questions?
@jamieschmid I really like this idea for gauging our needs
@jillbinder Thanks, @jamieschmid! It would be great if we can keep our tasks streamlined down to what will actually forward our specific, measurable goals.
I also like the idea of everyone knowing what everyone else is working on, and having this structure to make sure everything is communicated well.
I forgot the big KPI for our team overall at the top. I will add that.
The big KPI is 100+ meetups are running our workshop by the end of 2020.
It would be worthwhile to create a smaller goal for 2019. Maybe… half that? 50? Thoughts?
@jillbinder
Or our goal could be something else, like getting ourselves ready to serve more.
If there were a specific, measurable way we could phrase that.
@jamieschmid
How about getting our feedback score up? We’re planning on updating a lot of the training materials right?
@jillbinder
Yes. We didn’t get many replies on the questionnaire — but we also need a better system for sending that out and reminding people to fill it out. So we don’t really have a feedback score to compare to.
A goal could be getting a high number of feedback questionnaires back…
So this is a doc I’d like people to be going in and adding their items, updating the items, clarifying bits, asking us questions when they don’t know, etc.
The “by when” (deadline) is one of the most important bits, as I’ve discovered that without a deadline, things don’t get done.
So can you go through and look at your items, ask us questions now, edit things that need editing, and fill in a “by when” you’ll be doing your task?
One of the things I may add is an easier way to see your own items. Like with a filter.
@jamieschmid
I’ll come back to this sheet after I take the training with Miriam 🙂 not sure yet how I’ll be contributing
Apart from messaging which Larry hasn’t gotten back to me yet on meeting
@jillbinder
Sure thing, @jamieschmid. Though I do believe you and Larry are starting with the words, and that’s something we’ll want started soon.
When I asked @laryswan about what he was picturing for the Promotions team that he suggested, he said:
“I think it would work best for me and Jamie to work up top-level messaging first and run it by team. With that in place, we can form marketing team and craft individual messages.
“As to who to lead it . . . I like the idea of involving the marketing team, but if someone already on our team wanted to lead, that could work, too.”
So if you’re game for Larry’s plan, you have a great role already!
@jillbinder
But/and yes to taking the training, as it’s easier to see the pieces when you understand our work better.
And the sooner you can run a workshop for one of the cities you’re planning, the easier it’ll be, too.
It would be great if folks on our team who are taking the training can fill out our form so they get into our Helpscout queue and then we can do our proper follow up processes and such. Particularly if they are going to be running it for their meetup, as well.
@jamieschmid if you haven’t already, can you fill out https://tiny.cc/wpwomenspeak ?
@miriamgoldman is writing up her journey and a testimonial
@jillbinder And also I have in mind 2 other items that aren’t in the doc yet:
Creating a follow-up email to go out to workshops who were trained that has all of the info in it that they need post-training. Including the questionnaire so that maybe some of them will think about it right away and remember it when they’ve run the workshop…
And a question I have about slides.
The first may be an item for our Train the Trainers zoom call, and the second we might be able to cover today… and/or also in that call.
@jillbinder
Also, any questions or concerns/blocks from anyone on their immediate actions?
@miriamgoldman
None here. Just that I’ll be doing a Doodle as well for the train the trainers onboarding. It’s likely not possible until late February due to my personal schedule.
And also does anyone see any actions missing from this list and/or the project management dashboard?
@cguntur @jillbinder how can I help? I wasn’t there for the zoom meeting. Not sure where and how I can help
@jillbinder
Thanks @cguntur! Can I send you the zoom call video recording so that you can watch that and then tell me what you’d like to do.
Anyone else on our team who missed the call and would like to see the video, please ping me and I’ll make sure you get that too.
My question on slides
Currently it’s in a “choose your own adventure” style where at the end of each lesson, there are links to the lessons they could do next. That way people can just pick and choose which lessons they are running in their own “playlist”. Like say, 1, 3, 5.
It made sense at the time, but I suddenly had the brainstorm idea:
Why not remove the links and just make the slides follow each other in sequence. If someone needs to flip through a lesson or two to get to the lesson that they want, it’s probably not a big deal……
I’m under the impression that the current format makes sense to some and is confusing to some. Though Trainers, you probably have a better handle on what people are currently thinking about it.
If we did change it, does it make the current recording confusing? Since part of the video we show them is about using the slides.
I welcome thoughts. Or I can bring it up in our “how to improve the training” Zoom call we’ll have and be able to have discussion on it.
Open time for questions / discussion / concerns / kudos about anything on our team, your upcoming things to do, etc.
@miriamgoldman
None here. Just gotta set aside the time to do the things I need to do.
@jamieschmid
It all looks good to me! Will follow up with Larry to set up a time to make the messaging plan
@jamieschmid Sounds good about following up with Larry. Thanks for doing that!
@jillbinder
My kudos is how excited I am for the new ideas and energy that everyone is bringing to the team, and looking forward to how we are going to shape up this year.
And that I’m already liking the dashboard. It was easy to go through just now to show here what people are doing next.
Some of that info was in my head, though. I knew which ones are next vs can wait a bit. We’ll need to find a way to show that. (Probably with the by when / deadlines.)
@miriamgoldman is writing up her journey and a testimonial
@jillbinder post recap of the weekend’s Kickoff Zoom call
@jillbinder adding a big KPI for our team overall at the top of the dashboard
All: Can you go through the dashboard and look at your items, ask us questions now, edit things that need editing, and fill in a “by when” you’ll be doing your task?
All: Anyone on our team who would like to see the video, please ping me for it.
Welcome to another meetup organizer newsletter full of news, information and inspiration for your local meetup. This is our first newsletter for the year 2019.
Newsletter contents:
The Annual Meetup Survey for Organizers
Event Format: A spreadsheet of ideas
Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops
The Annual Meetup Survey for Organizers
As announced last month, we changed the schedule slightly and will be sending the Annual meetup survey in January. These are surveys we send out to all members help us get feedback on the meetup program, which can help us on improving things. So more members sharing their views is actually better.
Along with our member survey, we are also sending the Annual Organizer Meetup Survey – which can be accessed at
Please help us improve our support of meetup organizers all over the world by taking 10 minutes to fill out the organizer survey! 🙂
Event Format: A spreadsheet of ideas
During WCUS Contributor day, one of the projects was to search through meetup.com for interesting / unusual meetups event formats and topics that could be recommended in future meetup organizer newsletters, like this one. Now we have a whole spreadsheet of ideas to pick from.
It would be useful resource to go through and use as a reference, for organizers who are planning meetups in their cities.
Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops
The meetups who have been running the diversity outreach speaker training workshop to get more women and other underrepresented groups to start speaking at their meetups and WordCamps have been having encouraging results.
Many of the WordCamps achieved 50% or more women speakers in less than a year.
The Diversity Outreach Speaker Training Workshops will be at the following timings:
Hello to all our Deputies, WordCamp organizers, Meetup wranglers, and WordPress Community builders! You were probably hard at work this weekend. Tell us what you got accomplished in our #weekly-update!
Have you run into a roadblock with the stuff you’re working on? Head over to #community-events or #community-team in Slack and ask for help!
