Tag Archives: community-team

Francesca Marano 6:19 pm on August 1, 2017
Tags: , community-team, ,   

Community Team Chat Agenda | 03 August 2017

Hello community team!

Our bi-monthly Community Team chat is happening this Thursday, August 3rd. Meeting times are 08:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC in #community-team on Slack – we use the same agenda for both meetings in order to include all time zones.

Agenda

Please post in the comments if you have some agenda items to add so we can update this post as we go.

1. Deputy check-in – What have you been working on? Any blockers? Anything that you need help with?
2. Decision Making Process – we posted about it on the P2 and we would love to gather more feedback, discuss this during the call.
3. Highlighting a few P2 posts – No real discussion needed, but these are posts worth highlighting for all deputies (add the posts in the comments and I’ll add them here 😉)

Recaps will be in the comments

  • 08:00 UTC
  • 20:00 UTC Notes

#meetings #agenda #meeting-notes

Francesca Marano 1:16 pm on July 22, 2017
Tags: community-team   

Community Team Decision Making Process

In the past the members of the Community Team had some informal discussions about the decision making process: the conversation is very broad and we haven’t tackled it in a structured way up until now.

Since April, the Community team switched from having a single monthly chat that didn’t always had an agenda, to a bi-monthly chat, held at 08:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC to take into account different timezone, with an agenda that covers topics that might come up in our channels and highlights the latest from our blog. Attendance is good, people are engaged in the discussions and in general it seems that so far this has been a welcome change in our workflow.

It also helped us approaching broader subjects, about the Community team itself and its organisation.

One question that resurfaces every now and then is: how do we come to decisions? How do we wrap up all the discussions that float around us and come to conclusions? From comments in our Slack channels or P2 posts to issues that might be brought up to our support email, there is a lot going on in the Community team!

This is a broad conversation that touches on different subjects. The following are only a few:

  1. Media: the different media we use to communicate have different purposes, the Slack channels are for bouncing off ideas and replying to direct questions, but when we need to agree upon something we direct the person that has raised the issue to post in our P2 to gather feedback. Sometimes delicate issues are not brought in public but are dealt via email between the interested parties and then made public when a decision is made.
  2. Who: some issues are easily solved, everyone says what they think, either via a poll or comments, there are no major roadblocks (usually financial or technical), the majority of the feedback is positive so we move on. This is what happened when we decided to change the chat model. Some issues though require a more structured approach, especially if the outcome has a great impact on the whole WordPress community, not only the Community Team. Who is involved in this kind of decisions?
  3. How: after we identify the who, how those final deciders actually make the decisions they make? What processes and tools and tools can we use?
  4. Tracking: we use our P2 to gather feedback, how do we track open issues? Let’s say we come up with a workflow from now on, how do we deal with the threads that were opened in the past and never reached a conclusion?

The above items are just a few and they are mostly related to a practical workflow that defines roles, capabilities, procedures to gather feedback and come to decisions. But what about the emotional side of things? Who is taking the heat for unpopular decisions? How are they seen in the Community?

So, lots of food for thought!

Let’s set ourselves a goal of spending about two weeks on this discussion, closing it on August 3, in time for our next chat. After that I’ll gather all the comments and we’ll go from there to determine our next steps.

Thank you!

#community-team

Francesca Marano 11:08 am on July 17, 2017
Tags: , community-team, ,   

Community Team Chat Agenda | 20 July 2017

Hello community team!

Our bi-monthly Community Team chat is happening this Thursday, July 20th. Meeting times are 08:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC in #community-team on Slack – we use the same agenda for both meetings in order to include all time zones.

Agenda

Please post in the comments if you have some agenda items to add so we can update this post as we go.

1. Deputy check-in – What have you been working on? Any blockers? Anything that you need help with?
2. Decision Making Process
3. Highlighting a few P2 posts – No real discussion needed, but these are posts worth highlighting for all deputies:

Recaps in the comments

#meetings #agenda #meeting-notes

Cami Kaos 10:28 pm on June 14, 2017
Tags: community-team,   

This week’s Community Team chat?

We’re scheduled to host Community Team chats tomorrow at 08:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC in #community-team channel on slack. With so many of us busy with WordCamp Europe and the 2017 Community Summit we seem to have missed the usual window for posting an agenda for the meeting. Since part of the goal is to maintain parity between the two meeting times we should determine what we’d like to do in regards to tomorrow’s two chats.

We need to decide to cancel this week’s chats under the circumstances or proceed without a clear agenda.

** Edited to add a third option — Move the meetings ahead by one week to June 22 at the regular times.

Please let us know your preference in comments below.

This should be decided prior to the 08:00 UTC meeting time.

#team-chat #community-team

Cami Kaos 9:24 pm on June 12, 2017
Tags: community-team   

June 12-18 — Limited Availability

With so many volunteers, deputies, and full time staff traveling for and attending WordPress Community Summit and WordCamp Europe there will be limited availability on slack, and email this week. We’ll do our best to keep up but please expect delays.

Vendor payments and reimbursements will continues as scheduled.

#community-team

Courtney P.K. 9:32 pm on April 10, 2017
Tags: community-team, , , ,   

Community Team Chat Schedule

In our Community Team Chats this month, we discussed the possibility of changing our monthly team chat to bi-weekly (every other week) or weekly. We’d like to hear what you think! Please take a moment to respond to the poll below.

 

Please respond by Friday, 14 April. If we all agree on a change, we’ll post an update on the change next week.

#community-team, #meeting, #meetings, #team-chat, #team-meeting

Andrea Middleton 1:34 am on February 8, 2017
Tags: community-team   

Microgrants Program: call for volunteers

Monthly meetups are great. WordCamps are great. We love them both! And yet, there are lots of other event types out there — workshops, hackathons, and contributor days, to name a few — that would help our local community groups share WordPress knowledge and inspire people to do more with WordPress. How can we make it easier for local communities to organize more events? Maybe money would help.

In 2017, we want to provide financial support to local WordPress communities that want to organize “bigger-smaller events” (bigger than a monthly meetup but smaller than an annual WordCamp) like this, though a microgrants program. We also want to track the events that receive financial support and be able to report on the results. The program will be paid for out of surplus WordCamp funds.

The microgrants program has six main components:

  1. An application form that will collect information like: what community is requesting funds and details about what the funds will allow them to do, probably similar to the WordCamp application on Central.
  2. An easy way for grant recipients to submit vendor payment and/or reimbursement requests up to the sum of their grant amount.
  3. A debrief form that will collect the results of whatever the funding went to, in a way that can be collected into an end-of-year report of some kind.
  4. A nice clear set of expectations around what the program will fund in this first (experimental) year.
  5. Event organizing documentation in the handbooks for grant applicants who want to explore new kinds of event.
  6. Deputy training materials for volunteers who are interested in reviewing/processing grant applications.

I mentioned this idea here previously (you’re not experiencing deja vu), and I’m honored to say that @kcristiano has agreed to lead the work on this project during my sabbatical (in case you missed it, I’ll be gone from February 20-May 15). Kevin’s deep knowledge of the WordPress community as well as non-profits and accounting systems makes him pretty much the perfect person to make this program a reality, but he can’t do it alone! (Please don’t make him do it alone!) A few months ago, @ryelle was kind enough to start working on some of the forms we’ll need, but we’re still in the infancy stage of this program and that means We! Need! You!

If you’re interested in helping to draft this program or building the tools to make it work, please comment below! If you have questions, concerns, or recommendations about this program, please comment below as well!

If you want to talk to Kevin or me about this program in real time, we’ll be available together at 21:00 UTC this Friday, February 10 in #community-team for a very preliminary, highly informal kick-off meeting. (You don’t have to be available at that time to participate in this project.)

Andrea Middleton 8:14 pm on January 12, 2017
Tags: community-mentors, community-team   

Support for Community Team Mentors

According to @brandondove‘s excellent mentorship program report at today’s meeting, we have 27 deputies volunteering as mentors in total, with 19 people actively mentoring WordCamps. We hope to have a crowd of new deputies join the ranks once we launch the new deputy training materials early this year.

Both now and in the future, it’s been suggested that deputies could benefit from more peer support and communication with other deputies. Some suggestions for ways to put deputies more closely in touch with each other have included:

  • weekly meetings in #community-team slack
  • mentor hangouts
  • a private slack channel for deputies on wordpress.org slack
  • a public #community-mentors channel on wordpress.org slack
  • DM groups on wordpress.org slack

Do you have a suggestion, preference, comment, or concern? Let’s discuss!

Courtney P.K. 8:57 pm on December 15, 2016
Tags: , community-team   

Winter Holiday Coverage

With the winter holidays upon us, most full-time community team folks will be taking some time off. For the last two weeks of the year (19–31 December), we’ll have limited coverage to help with most things that come up.

Payments will not be made between 24 Dec 2016 and 4 Jan 2017. If you have any payments that need to arrive in that timeline, please submit your payment request as soon as possible. Please note that US Banks are closed on 25 Dec and 1 Jan, which can additionally slow payments.

Responses to applications and email to support@wordcamp.org will be slow during this time. If you have a question or request which needs answering before the end of the year, please let us know as soon as possible!

If you’re a deputy who has some extra time and you’d like to help out, either stop by the #community-team channel in Slack or head right into SupportPress.

We’ll be back to normal schedules the first week of 2017. Cheers!

#afk