A Working Group is a team of contributors who are focused on achieving a specific task or developing a new program. Working groups are temporary, and thus should set a goal for their launch/completion date. Working groups can be small or large, and should be open to any community team contributor, though it’s ok to limit participation somewhat based on a certain set of skills or experience.
Working group organizing:
- Propose a working group, with an explanation of the need for a working group, how the group will create a solution/tool to fill that need, and calling for feedback (and possibly leadership). A working group’s goal should fit within the goals of the global community teamGlobal Community Team A group of community organizers and contributors who collaborate on local events about WordPress — monthly WordPress meetups and/or annual conferences called WordCamps..
- Name the leader of the working group in a comment on that post.
- The working group lead posts a call for volunteers, including an outline of the group’s goal, a list of useful skills/experience, an estimate of the time period of the project, and a Doodle to set a biweekly meeting time.
- Once a biweekly meeting time is set, the working group lead schedules the first meeting and informs all interested parties (this sometimes is best done 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/.) of the meeting.
- In the first meeting(s), the group will better define the scope of the project, identify milestones and tools to achieve their goals, identify responsibilities (including someone who will report on the progress of the group), meeting schedule, and launch date.
A note on meetings: We’ve found that biweekly meetings seem to be most effective, but a short-term, urgent project might require more frequent meetings.
It’s expected that discussions will be held in #community-team channel or on the make/cmty 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/., not in private spaces unless the group is discussing sensitive/private information. If the geographical spread of the working group team members is very broad and the group is large enough, the group might decide to hold two biweekly meetings at different times, or switch off the biweekly meeting time between meetings.
Additional best practices:
Do everything in public, all the time, preferably in spaces that are archived (Slack, P2s).
Credit contributors, credit contributors, credit contributors.
Post meeting agendas and meeting notes.
