The problem

Over the past months we’ve tried two meeting slots at different times, then a 12-hour open window, hoping to catch more people across timezones. Neither change moved the needle. Attendance and participation remain low, and, as we discussed openly in the April meeting, most of the value of these meetings can already be absorbed by reading the agenda or the recap afterward. If a meeting can be fully replaced by a 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 post, it’s not really a meeting anymore.

We (the 2026 Team Reps) have talked this through and want to propose splitting what today is a single monthly meeting into two separate, more focused things.

The proposal

1. A monthly written update (unchanged in spirit, clarified in purpose)

We’ll keep publishing a monthly post at the start of each month summarizing what the team has been working on: policy changes, WordCamps, meetupsMeetup Meetup 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., Campus Connect recaps, education programs, and anything else worth surfacing for people who can’t follow every P2 post or 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/ thread.

What changes: this stops being “the agenda for a meeting” and becomes its own thing: a monthly digest, written by a different volunteer each month. We think this is a great low-friction way for people to start contributing to team coordination without needing to run a live session.

2. Coworking sessions

Instead of a status-update meeting, we want to try live coworking sessions: blocks of 1–2 hours where a group works together, in real time, on an actual team task.

Rough shape:

• Short kickoff (5–10 min): whoever’s hosting explains what we’re working on that session and why, and takes quick questions.
• Focused work blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.: everyone works (same or related tasks) with the channel/call open for “does anyone know how…” questions as they come up.
• Wrap-up (10–15 min): quick share of what got done, what’s blocked, and what needs follow-up.

Why we think this could work

The coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. insight from the discussion was that people don’t show up for information they can get elsewhere, they show up when there’s something to do together, or someone to ask in real time. A status meeting competes with reading a P2 post, and loses. A working session doesn’t have that competition, because you can’t “read” your way into having helped triage the backlog.

We’d love feedback before taking this further:

• Does the split between “written update” and “coworking” make sense to you?
• Any specific ideas about the coworking sessions format?
• Any concerns about coworking sessions being harder to join for volunteers in less common timezones (worse than a single meeting would be, since we’re not proposing multiple slots yet)?
• Should we pilot this for one or two months before committing, and if so, what would tell us it’s working better than the old format?

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Thanks to @adityakane @thehopemonger and @webtechpooja for reviewing the proposal.

#coworking, #meeting, #proposal