This is the home of the Make Community team for the WordPress open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project!
Here is where we have policy debates, project announcements, and assist community members in organizing events.
Everyone is welcome to comment on posts and participate in the discussions regardless of skill level or experience.
Get Involved
If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!
As part of WordPress Community Team Training series, we are excited to invite the community members to attend our upcoming Zoom Training Session scheduled as follows:
Title
Using Learn WordPress at your WordPress MeetupMeetupMeetup 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.
WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/’s Learn WordPress platform is a comprehensive resource for users looking to learn more about the WordPress content management system and its various features and functions. The platform offers a variety of resources which are designed to help people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through synchronous and asynchronous learning. The resources on Learn WordPress include learning materials such as tutorials, courses, and online workshops, as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors to use in live environments.
Overall, Learn WordPress is an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn more about WordPress and become proficient in using the platform.
This training will cover how you can use Learn WordPress in your WordPress meetup events.
MentorEvent SupporterEvent Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues.: Courtney P.K.
Courtney P.K. has been using WordPress since 2004, and has been a full time sponsored contributor to the WordPress open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project since 2016. View Courtney’s WordPress Profile.
Mentor: Destiny Kanno
Destiny Kanno is Make WordPress Training 2023 Team RepTeam RepA Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.. Incident Response Team Member. Community Education Manager sponsored by Automattic. View Destiny’s WordPress Profile.
RSVP
Please RSVP, so you will receive an invitation in your email that will include the Zoom link. If you have any questions, feel free to email to support@wordcamp.org.
As part of WordPress Community Team Training series, we are excited to invite the community members to attend our upcoming Zoom Training Session scheduled as follows:
Active Listening – Hear What People are Really Saying
Communication is also one of the most challenging and important facets of our work, and we sure do a ton of it! In this workshop, we’ll explore how to communicate empathetically through active/reflective listening so that we accurately hear, validate, and respond to what others are saying, whether it’s a community member, a client or customer, or a teammate. We’ll also examine different instances where active/reflective listening techniques can be utilized. You’ll learn enhanced listening skills that can be applied to everyday conversations, and will bolster trust and strengthen relationships.
MentorEvent SupporterEvent Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues.: Angela Jin
Angela Jin is the Head of Programs and Contributor Experience at Automattic. She is a dedicated volunteer with a passion for building strong, inclusive communities. Originally from Seattle, Washington, Angela is currently trying out Madrid, Spain, where she delights in learning Spanish, exploring by eating, and reading a good book. View Angela’s WordPress Profile.
RSVP
Please RSVP using the link above, so you will receive an invitation in your email that will include the Zoom link. If you have any questions, feel free to comment here.
Some community members have been helping with the Learn WordPress workshop and discussion group facilitator application vetting process. I’m writing this post to clarify the current shape of the vetting process and present some suggestions.
This task is something any interested deputyProgram SupporterCommunity 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. can do and is similar to WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more./MeetupMeetupMeetup 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. vetting in most of the parts. Leave a comment if you are interested in helping!
The information is saved as a Workshop custom post typeCustom Post TypeWordPress can hold and display many different types of content. A single item of such a content is generally called a post, although post is also a specific post type. Custom Post Types gives your site the ability to have templated posts, to simplify the concept. (CPT) entry on learn.wordpress.org
A deputy checks the “Needs Vetting” status workshop posts from the backend of the Learn site
They send a new message on HelpScout (requesting more info, approving, or declining)
Generally speaking the process is well-established and smooth.
Small Pain Points
What I find difficult is step 5 when the person is fully qualified but I don’t have enough technical or editorial knowledge to make a decision on the proposed content.
Problem: We don’t really have a way to connect each workshop with the relevant HelpScout message because currently there isn’t any field in the workshop CPT to add private notes.
Ideas for Improvement
These are some ideas
Contact the subject matter expert from the Training Team at step 5 above when there’s a doubt about the contents.
We could share the unpublished workshop URLURLA specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org in the #trainingSlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel, like this.
When Slack is not an appropriate place for discussion, can we assign one of the Training Team members in HelpScout and discuss it there?
Make sure to connect the workshop application with a HelpScout message
For now, we can add a note with a workshop URL to a related HelpScout message (this will at least solve the issue on one side)
Add a field to add HelpScout URL in the workshop CPT, similar to WordCamp and Meetup vetting (only add the URL and write vetting notes to a HS note) – enable this through EditFlow?
@katiejrichards is nearly done with the “Creating A Welcoming and Diverse Space” workshop transcript. Delivering the Spanish translations for “Diverse Speakers workshop” to #training is done, and if there is anything more she will take care of it.
We are inviting more people to run our workshop so that we can cover more days, times, and parts of the world:
@onealtr is going to run an Interactive, Transformational Watch party of our “Own your expertise and find a topic” workshop for the Philippines and surrounding areas in early May. He is doing the pre-work of reviewing the material, and will chat with the communities about the workshop and set a date with them.
@wpfangirl is going to run it sometime – maybe the summer.
Our workshop makes WordPress a more diverse, better, and stronger place. If you are interested in contributing to this and learning about running our workshop, please reach out to @jillbinder.
@onealtr is going to run our working group meeting on April 28th while I am away. @angelasjin will support him.
Summary: We followed up on where team members are at in their individual projects. We started creating a plan for putting together our stats for our 2019 Year End Report. I asked for help with a summary paragraph for the top of our workshop script.
Summary: The team talked about what they’ve been accomplishing and what they plan to work on next. Jill talked about working with Courtney P.K. to add our materials to the MeetupMeetupMeetup 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. and WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizer handbooks. For collecting year-end stats next year, we are going to try out having groups self-report on their WordCamp speaker diversity, and then as a backup plan, have automated tools calculate WordCamp speaker genders. Our new workshop is finished and ready for our Translation team to work on. We are starting with Japanese, Bengali, and Spanish. Jill is trying a year-end experiment within the group this December: self-reviews. We talked about a few items in the open discussion time. This was our last meeting of the year, as the next one would fall on Christmas.
Announcement from Automattic of my sponsorship for this work
My video
Current stats
Where we’re at with the first train the trainers today
Test and recording with team
Update on Translations
Where we’re at in our roadmap
Reports
(Includes folks who sent me their reports ahead of time.)
@miriamgoldman I’m holding a train the trainers this afternoon.
@angelasjin I think I need to schedule a train the trainers session for August? I need to sort out my schedule (I’ll get there) and would like to confer with other trainers to see what time would be most effective. And I recall some updating of our trainings, but I’m a bit behind on what that looks like.
@cguntur I am planning to attend the train the trainers session this afternoon!
@simo70 The Verona meetupMeetupMeetup 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. went well. I talked about myths, how to find an idea, write a bio and make good slides. I could not continue with the Italian translations.
@aurooba I don’t have an update on marketing stuff as of right now.
@rahuldsarker Rahul joined the team in our meeting today and has 10 hours a week to contribute. Welcome!
Announcement from Automattic of my sponsorship for this work
It is now officially public knowledge: Automattic posted last week about supporting this work with giving me a 50% sponsorship to lead the team!
I have a video about the impact that this work has. It is promoting my new business to take this work outside of WordPress, but everything up until the end is all about this project. It’s only 3 min so give it a watch to see what we’ve accomplished. It is mighty impressive!
As we are having our first train the trainers since the reboot this afternoon, I thought I’d share where our stats are before that. We did have the team going for the first couple of months in the year, so that is where these come from.
We trained 5 cities:
Ahmedabad, India
Torino, Italy
Sevilla, Spain
Portland (I think?), USA
Milan, Italy
4 cities have run the training:
Torino, Italy
Portland (I think?), USA
Milan, Italy
Vancouver, BC
It’s a solid start. With our new processes that’ll make everything easier and with @aurooba heading up our marketing (with the help of the #marketing team), we are going to be doing a lot more.
Where we’re at with Train the Trainers
For those who are new, Train the Trainers is where we walk chapter meetup organizers through our workshop material. We were running them 1-2 times a month and starting today we are doing them again at about this schedule.
We currently have one scheduled for June. That is later today at 5-7pm Eastern time.
You can still sign up for it by going to https://tiny.cc/wpdiversity
It was my intention to get the new processes started before today’s training.
What is done:
A couple of new fields on the form. We want to have people book a training after they have scheduled a workshop at their meetup. In the future we’ll have more info so that they can decide they want to do it and create their meetup in advance. As we don’t have that in place yet, I put the fields in but optionally for now.
What isn’t done:
I wanted to have our calendly ready to test out people choosing a training with it, and seeing how it does with sending out the various reminders and info. But it turns out I needed people who own that account to do things to set me up, and WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe got in the way of that. So I’ll be able to talk to the person who can help me today and get that going.
Test and recording with team
While I’m putting together the “long” and “short” versions of the workshop, I’ve been working on smoothing out the workshop material. I would like to test out a new “writing your biography” exercise.
I would like help from 6 folks on Zoom calls with me sometime in the next couple of weeks, please. Three to test old way and then new way and three to test new way and then old way.
Let me know here or in the comments of the recap if you can do this, please!
This is a long heads-up that in a few months (I need to check when on the roadmap) as part of the new Train the Trainers to teach the new, easier workshop, I will want to have a recording of people taking the workshop that meetupsMeetupMeetup 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. can watch.
And I would like as many members of our group to be on that, please. Partly so that we’ve all taken it, and partly because it’ll be a great contribution to the project.
It’ll likely be two 2-hour sessions, each a week apart.
I will send out a scheduling poll to us soon for the full workshop sessions so that we can have folks schedule around being able to attend.
Update on Translations
Quick update on Translations. Our mini Translations team is no longer available to do the speaker training workshop and train the trainers translations into other languages.
But the good news is, we have an entire WordPress team available to us to pick it up. The #polyglots team.
So I will:
reach out to that team soon
start communicating now what our needs will be in a couple of months when the long and short workshops are available
check in on what kind of schedule they would like re: how many translations over how many months
I would love to have a co-lead for communicating with #polyglots about Translations with me. Who would be willing do this ongoing project with me?
@rahuldsarker I can translate to Bangali, our local language.
Where we’re at in our roadmap
I think I was overeager when I created the June plan, and so not all is done. June isn’t over and there is time to do more! but I will update where each item is at.
[Material] Improving the training based on the feedback from email questionnaires and things Jill has learned
Yes – I am doing this on the future long and short workshops. But I also want to get essential items into the current workshop and I haven’t done that yet.
fyi we have a new team member, @incredimike, who is going to do the githubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ requests on the #training team’s system for these changes.
[Promotion] Create a shorter team name
Done! Woohoo!
[Team] Publish roadmap; Recruit more volunteers
Roadmap published and it included the call out for volunteers. We’ve had a few new since then!
[Trainers] Get us using new systems (calendly, require they’ve created a meetup for it, email questionnaire)
This was ambitious and not yet done. I hope to get calendly going this week. The other 2 are big jobs.
[Trainers] Schedule first new training(s) starting in June
Yes! @miriamgoldman is doing one later today. :thumbsup:
[Trainers] Start giving trainings again, 1-2 times a month
Yes, and we need to schedule out for July and August. Right now I think we have 2 active trainers, @miriamgoldman and @angelasjin. I can jump in as needed. We have a few more folks who are wanting to be trainers, so let’s get them ready soon.
It’s a bit tricky while we’re in the middle of changing our processes, but we’ll see what we can do.
Miriam and Angela, you might be needed a bit more frequently in the next couple of months before we get more folks on board.
I’ll chat with you both out of the meeting.
[Trainers] Jill record a short video on what this is
Ambitious and not yet done.
[Andrea, Jill, Trainers / Promotion] Create new email questionnaire follow-up system and/or Zoom interviews; Send it out to previous facilitators; Start collecting case studies for marketing ?
Very ambitious and not yet done.
That is the June list!
@angelasjin: That’s a really ambitious list, and even though everything isn’t checked off, a lot of great work was done! So, awesome job!
Upcoming items on the roadmap:
June – July
[Translations] Translating the workshop and materials to Brazilian Portuguese and Italian [Trainers] Contact past attendees and dormant emails (not responded in several months) to let the new speaker wranglers this year know about workshop and see if they’d like training [Trainers] Contact past attendees to see if they’d like to take it again [Trainers] Contact past attendees for their info for the “Past Workshops Celebration” page [Jill] Communication and accountability system
July
[Promotion] Jill finish Build Speaker Roster essay [Promotion] Put the workshop into the materials for WordCamp Speaker wranglers and the Meetups info [Training, Promotion] Create a “Past Workshops Celebration” page on Make WordPress that shows images, stats, and maybe stories of each workshop
The ongoing items are going well.
Except that I missed the June newsletter workshop deadline by a bit and so they didn’t publish the new testimonial and info about today’s training. We have sorted out a system so that that won’t happen again next month.
Next Actions
All on team, watch my 3 min video to see the impressive work we’ve done so far. (Ignore the end that is promo for taking the work outside of WordPress.) https://diversein.tech/video/
Anyone on our team or any meetup organizers can still sign up for the Train the Trainers later today at 5-7pm Eastern time. https://tiny.cc/wpdiversity
Jill finishing calendly setup this week.
I need 6 volunteers to do a one-hour call with me to test the new biography exercise. Three signed up today. Three more please!
Jill schedule the biography testing calls with the volunteers.
Jill create poll to schedule when as many people as possible on our team can attend a recording session of our whole workshop to use in our training material. Aiming for September.
I would love to have a co-lead for communicating with #polyglots about Translations with me. Who would be willing do this ongoing project with me?
Translations follow up with @rahuldsarker about future Bangali translation
A small admin task for someone: cross-reference our Helpscout queue with our Tracking sheet to separate out which requests came in 2019.
Reviewing the Roadmap
Talk about the Trainers process coming up: June – First internal improvements and have a Training last week of June (cc @angelasjin and @miriamgoldman); July – More internal improvements and another Training
Next Actions
Marketing Action Items
1. Reports
@jillbinder Last time we finalized and started changing everywhere our new hashtag: #WPDiversity.
We’ve talked for a while about having a cleaner, shorter name for our group. Especially as we are going to be promoting our team a lot coming up. It was: Diversity Outreach Speaker Training group. @andreamiddleton and I have been bouncing around names for months, and we just landed on Diverse Speaker Training group. I ran it by our team last week and everyone who replied was a yes. So now it is official.
@miriamgoldman, @angelasjin, and I tried out Actioned for the project management, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t have the clear view of what everyone is doing that I thought I’d have.
@angelasjin: Everything that @jillbinder said. Actioned was interesting for sure, but TrelloTrelloProject management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. provides a better view. Great suggestion @aurooba!
@miriamgoldman: Ditto on the Actioned. I agree that it wasn’t clear. Neat, but unclear.
@jillbinder: If you’re putting up your own card in Trello, there is a template of the format that you can copy and paste if you wish to use the same.
Can someone who has access to the Trello be our point person for requests for invites from folks?
@jillbinder We all like doing Trello that is a hybrid of a view of what everyone is doing, along with @aurooba’s suggestions of splitting up things that aren’t doing yet, doing, and done.
Here is the new Trello: https://trello.com/b/xnIFkJo0/diverse-speakers-training-wpdiversity-project-tracker
I’m using the card format that I created early this year with a project manager to help make sure everyone is really clear what they are doing, by when, etc. When I put a card up for you, please feel free to edit it.
Also if you’re putting up your own card, there is a template of the format that you can copy and paste if you wish to use the same.
Oh yes, one more thing on Trello. I have a column for Unassigned. It has cards that anyone can grab and do.
Just know that I will mostly be able to answer questions Mon – Thurs, and that I practise deep focus so I go through periods of turning notifications off… so I may not reply right away.
@jillbinder: Lastly from me, I have been working hard on our Roadmap, which we will look at later in the meeting.
@miriamgoldman I promoted our team, under the old name, on the BoldGrid podcast a few weeks ago.
@aurooba We’ve identified that the marketing route we want to take is to focus on community organizers and folks who can run the speaker training workshop in their communities.
To that end: 1) Short Term Plan: we want to devise a short term marketing plan that starts to get the word out a bit more 2) Outreach Tools: Create a set of outreach tools and resources to support organizers in running a successful workshop. There is a document set up to start brainstorming in: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15g5-nvP8P1s2OhixaRdQCVhxRMWqCOCyVWimChjubGU/edit and the Marketing Team will also be helping out during WCEU Contributor Day with ideas for these tools (you can see the trello card for that here: https://trello.com/c/zuaNHK0o), since many people there are within our target audience. Anyone here can also feel free to include their ideas. The objective is to identify 5-8 tools and resources that we can develop by the end of August 2019 to share with folks about to/interested in running the workshop in their community. 3) Marketing Roadmap: I’m working on setting up a marketing plan and will have something more to share and for everyone to contribute to next meeting. :slightly_smiling_face: 4) Everyone’s ideas are welcome on the marketing side, so please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have thoughts!
@jillbinder: Wow, fantastic work @aurooba! Just so everyone knows, Aurooba is going to be our Marketing lead. We met yesterday with Andrea, and Aurooba’s done all this in just one day.
@simo70 @jillbinder: I know that @simo70 ran the workshop yesterday, so we’ll follow up with her soon.
I’m running it again in Vancouver. I did it in person in May and I’m doing 2 online sessions in June. Session 1 last Saturday went great (lessons 1 & 2) and Session 2 (lessons 3-5) is this coming Saturday.
2. Admin task
Speaking of cards that anyone can grab, I have a relatively easy one for anyone who has access to our Helpscout queue (or would be willing to gain access).
Our workshop tracker spreadsheet currently doesn’t have years on the entries. It would be great to start up a new sheet in the same doc for 2019 and refer to Helpscout to see which ones should be moved over to the 2019 sheet. Can anyone do this?
@bhargavmehta: I can do Helpscout task. (I don’t have access to it).
@angelasjin: I will get you access to the HelpScout account.
3. Roadmap
@jillbinder Our team has a roadmap now for May 2019 – April 2020. It is here: https://make.wordpress.org/community/2019/06/11/diverse-speakers-training-group-road-map/
@angelasjin: Looks very solid to me! And you can confirm August trainings in my timezone.
@jillbinder: One of the things I’d like to point out on it is some of the flow:
Before the first training last week of June:
Improving our internal Train the Trainers flow (especially getting started on calendly and improving how we do Helpscout)
Putting the improvements into the material that we have
Putting requests for feedback, stories, photos, stats, etc into the workshop
In July:
Set up the system for participants to need to have scheduled a workshop meetupMeetupMeetup 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. first (maybe put that up as optional in June)
In August:
Start rolling out the improved “long” and “short” training
In the Fall:
Start creating the new Training videos for the new “long” and “short” I think most of these are “Jill to do” items, but if I can delegate anything I will, or if you see anything I could delegate, please let me know.
A note that the Marketing roadmap isn’t posted yet as that is something that @aurooba is going to be working on and then post it on the P2P2P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. when it’s ready.
I took a guess on Translations. @sheilagomes and @simo7, we can edit this schedule as you see fit! Also we should focus on the new “long” and “short” trainings rather than the 5 modules for Translations now. If that works for you, as I know you’ve already started. We can discuss.
I do have something for someone now. The #training team has a complicated githubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ way of submitting changes to training material. @lswanson learned it last year and was our person to do this, but he is no longer available. Would someone techie who could be available within a couple of business days each time a change is needed be able to do this? It requires watching and understanding a number of training videos from the #training team.
Let’s schedule a Training for the last week of June. @miriamgoldman it would be great if you could coordinate with @aurooba’s schedule so we can try to pick a time she can attend….
@miriamgoldman is letting Jill know tomorrow about doing the #training github process, and then Jill is discussing with the interested folks
@bhargavmehta is creating a new sheet in our workshop tracker for 2019 and putting all of the 2019 requests from Helpscout into it (including trainings that were completed, so you’ll need to check the Closed queue as well).
@jillbinder giving @cguntur admin access to Trello so people can ask her for invites (Done)
@aurooba create cards in our Trello with the template for the Marketing items
Marketing Action Items:
@aurooba: Draft marketing roadmap plan and open it up for feedback next meeting.
Everyone who wishes to Start coming up with outreach tool ideas and flesh them out a little with an outline of what they would contain in the doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15g5-nvP8P1s2OhixaRdQCVhxRMWqCOCyVWimChjubGU/edit If you need access, please pingPingThe act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me (@aurooba)
TrelloTrelloProject management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. for project management
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 meetupMeetupMeetup 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.
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 MeetupsMeetupMeetup 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. 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 metaMetaMeta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. 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 SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 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 WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. 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
GithubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ Train the Trainers course
Follow-up Email Questionnaire
Workshop sign up system
MeetupMeetupMeetup 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. workflow
MeetupsMeetupMeetup 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. spreadsheet project
Newsletter request for workshops that have run it
Train the trainers workshops — folks leaving early
Phases 1 and 2
A lot of little items that I want to communicate with everyone where it’s at, decisions made, etc. And if there’s time, #11 is a bigger item. I’m hoping for some discussion.
Reports
@miriamgoldman I’ve handed off some of my smaller tasks, such as the reminders and such, to others, so I can focus on the bigger items.
I’ve created a Doodle poll for Train the Trainer times I’m available to run the workshop, and will be sending that out this evening. This is for November.
I’m also going to actually RUN the workshop itself here in Ottawa sometime in the new year. Time to be determined once WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Ottawa planning resumes.
I’m also just providing minor general support when possible. 🙂
And had a great chat with @jillbinder about things on Friday. 😉
@angelasjin I did a train the trainers session last Wednesday that went well overall, and have been doing some HelpScout ticket triage. I’ll also be taking the email questionnaire and reporting back on the experience and how long it took me to take it this week.
@jillbinder
Wonderful, thanks for all your great work. You two have jumped in on things that haven’t been asked for where you’ve seen a need, and I’m grateful.
@cguntur I have been mainly doing Help Scout. I do have a question about the training sessions…. Can we create a google doc where we have all the training sessions listed?
First, Meetups who have run the workshop have been having great success overall, and I wanted to highlight one in particular who had an exceptional success.
Verona, Italy had 23 speakers at their WordCao: 21 first time WordCamp speakers, 11 women!
Woot! @WordCampVerona numbers are incredible! 23 speakers: 21 first time WordCamp speakers, 11 women 💪💪💪 #WCVRN
@carriedesign ran our workshop, who was trained by @simo70 to run it, who has been a superstar running the workshop many times in Italy.
Dormant Tags
We have a list of folks who have expressed interest in the training, but as @angelasjin pointed out during her recent triage work, we haven’t heard from some in a long time.
What we are going to do is this:
If they’ve stopped replying after two outreaches, we’ll do one more:
“if we don’t hear back from you by DATE, we’ll assume you’re no longer interested in organizing this training.”
Then give them a tag of Dormant and put their status to Closed.
I’ve asked @miriamgoldman to include this message while she is going through asking folks about the doodle poll for November.
Github Train the Trainers course
Thanks to @larryswanson, our Train the Trainers course is up on the #training team’s github!
This is our first draft. If there’s time, I’ll speak to Phase 1 vs Phase 2 of this and other items towards the end of the meeting today.
I’m internally calling it the “good enough for now” version. We’re having great success with it, and we’re also seeing many ways it can be improved. 🙂
Follow-up Email Questionnaire
We are almost ready to start sending out the email questionnaire follow-up to Meetups and organizations who have run the workshop.
It’s pretty much ready to go!
Goals:
Get info on where we can improve our offering
Get stats that we can report on how our team did at the end of the year. If we can get some good stats by WordCamp US, even better.
Next actions are:
@dianewallace does the small edits I just asked for. She will do them by end of her day tomorrow.
@angelasjin who has run the training in Seattle takes it by Sunday and reports how long it took her to take it.
Once we have those two things done, then I’ll coordinate with @dianewallace on where to get the info on whom to send the questionnaire to. Also I created a Saved Reply that you’ll be able to send them.
Workshop sign up system
Last meeting we talked about creating a system for folks to sign up for workshops. We talked about maybe using an existing event system or a survey.
@larryswanson, @angelasjin, and I chatted about this in person at WordCamp Vancouver and we decided to see what is available for us in Helpscout. @iandunn, who was also at the camp, agreed to look into this for us. @larryswanson and I are composing a message that he’ll post to Community P2P2P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. (the place where I post these recaps) and tag Ian in.
We have a list of wants, and I would say the main three big goals are:
Have people feel like they’ve signed up for something officially so they’re more likely to show up
Give the trainer an easy to refer to list of who is coming
Automated reminders that the training is coming up so we can lighten how much work the trainer needs to put into a training
Meetup workflow
It was pointed out to me that our workflow from “a Meetup expresses interest in training” through to “they’ve taken training and we follow up with them” is confusing. There are a number of moving pieces to it.
I have done up a flowchart, and @larryswanson and I are going to see if we can get help from another team to make it beautiful and clear.
However, if anyone in our team (or any lurkers not in our team) would love to do this, please let me know. ^_^
It would be really useful both for the folks who are currently in the process so that items don’t get missed as well as training future folks to jump in.
Meetups spreadsheet project
@angelasjin and @cguntur took a look through the giant Meetups titles spreadsheet to see if they could find other times that our workshop has been run that we haven’t known about. It wound up being a much bigger job than I had anticipated.
We got 7 highlighted, and now I’m looking for someone to check them against our known list.
@angelasjin: I can compare the ones we noted against our known list.
On that note, the other thing I did to try to find out if others have run the workshop is include it in the October Meetups newsletter. That went out last week and we haven’t heard from anyone yet.
Train the trainers workshops — folks leaving early
We had a case where a couple of participants of our Train the Trainers did not get what they thought they were there for and so left a training early.
And so we have come up with a guideline for what we’ll do if this happens again.
Before they leave, just say:
If you have any feedback on this train-the-trainers workshop, please let us know. If you found upon attending the workshop that it wasn’t what you expected, we’d love to know more about that, as well.
And we’ll leave it at that. Just the once during the meeting and not follow up with them after.
It would be great if you could add this to our Train The Trainers Q & A document, @webrite
On that note, I think I have forgotten to share this doc with our new trainers. I will rectify that after this meeting.
Phase 1 and Phase 2
So for our last item, I think we’ll dedicate another meeting to mostly this topic, but I’d like to just start chatting about it now so we can start thinking about it.
I will do so with full transparency, and all my “I don’t know”s!
When I started this project, I committed to leading it for 6 months. I’m a visionary and starter, not a maintainer.
However! It’s a year later and we are still creating the foundation of our project and I am still engaged in leading it.
But @andreamiddleton pointed out that it’s the kind of thing where there are always things to improve, and I might start feeling like I’ll be on it forever…
Which! Might not be bad. Here’s an I don’t know right now piece:
I might be willing to continue. Particularly if in my current career change I wind up finding funders to support my time on this. It’s a very time-consuming (though wonderful) project to lead. It has my heart. We are making a tangible, significant difference. I would rather be doing this than client work… and it has greatly eaten into my billable client work time… such that I can’t do both.
As this work has taking my heart so much, I’m currently in an alternative business school for social good entrepreneurships to figure out how to do this work in the world for money and be able to make a bigger impact.
It could be continuing the WP project, or it might be another form taking it out further.
My ideal would be funding to finish it here and then take that work further, as this community is such a wonderful creating and testing place. But we’ll see what happens as I go through my business school program!
That said, either way,
it would be really good for us to define a Phase 1 that I commit to seeing through,
and a Phase 2 that either I’m leading, co-leading, or that we find another leader to continue.
This has been really helpful in my focus. Realizing what items are likely essential pieces for now and which ones really are just improvements on what we have.
So as we’ve run out of time today and this is a larger discussion, in another meeting, I will want your input on which items are Phase 1 essential foundation and which ones are Phase 2 continuous improvement items.
I feel like Phase 1 is close and we might be able to call end of 2018 the end of Phase 1. I think that’ll be clearer when we all chat about it more.
I’m looking forward to chatting more about Phase 1 and Phase 2 in the next meeting or two.
Decisions and Actions
@cguntur created a Google doc for us to keep maintained with the scheduled training sessions and their corresponding Zoom links @miriamgoldman and @jillbinder are going to look it over today. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v0EsrRLXTXr579kDjFE2DmeEeFKpsCxMYyqkUQaC5wg/edit?usp=sharing
@jillbinder is going to follow up today with @webrite about giving help or support for the meeting reminders
@jillbinder will share her Zoom account with any trainers who don’t have a paid Zoom account, starting with @miriam
@miriamgoldman is going to include the Dormant question to those who haven’t replied in 2 or more outreaches while she is going through asking folks about the doodle poll for November. She is sending these out by end of day in her timezone tomorrow. As discussed, she confirmed instructions with me right after the meeting.
We will discuss at a future time how to proceed with monitoring and maintaining the Dormants going forward.
@dianewallace is doing the small edits to the email questionnaire follow-up by end of her day tomorrow.
@angelasjin who has run a workshop in Seattle is going to take our email questionnaire and let us know how long it took her to do, by Sunday. Would anyone else in our team who has also run the training be willing to take it by Sunday to report on the time? Please reply here or SlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.@jillbinder.
Would anyone be willing to help @larryswanson and I make a more beautiful and clear flowchart or other instruction format for our Meetups workflow?
@angelasjin is comparing the Meetups titles found to our “known workshops” spreadsheet, by Sunday.
@jillbinder is sending the Trainers Q&A document to our new trainers today.
After @dianewallace has done the questionnaire edits, @jillbinder will coordinate with her on where to get the info on whom to send the questionnaire to.
@jillbinder is asking @webrite if she can add this to our Trainers Q&A document:
If participants leave a Train the Trainers early, say to them:
“If you have any feedback on this train-the-trainers workshop, please let us know. If you found upon attending the workshop that it wasn’t what you expected, we’d love to know more about that, as well.”
Thanks for all your work so far and bye for now.
End time: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C037W5S7X/p1540404322000200
