A Community Core Team

While gathering feedback from the deputiesProgram Supporter Community 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./mentorsEvent Supporter Event 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. (also, can we just say deputies instead of separating that into two different labels? “people helping with community wrangling” is the definition for both despite different tasks) is important in deciding what changes to make to this program, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit that we can start knocking down.

Here’s an apple dangling from its branch:

We need to make leadership of the community team more decentralized, more globally distributed, more reliable, and more transparent. 

Starting the deputies program was a step in that direction, but we need to go a lot further, and I think we are ready.

Currently

Right now, the “official” leadership of this team rests with Josepha and Cami, with me and Andrea coming back in for awhile to help catch up the backlog and try to organize some stuff to be more efficient. All four of these people are in the US, and all four are employed by Automattic. Then we have a handful or two of deputies that help out a little or a lot, depending on what else they’ve got going on. Most of these deputies are not employed by Automattic, and a few are not US-based, but we don’t necessarily know how much time they can give each week, and the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. people for whom this is a full-time job wind up feeling overwhelmed when the backlog grows and they have to try and catch up when the volunteers have other things to do that week. The vagaries of wrangling volunteers and making up for when they won’t or can’t deliver should be familiar territory for all our deputies, since you’ve been in this position yourselves when organizing WordCamps or 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.. It’s frustrating, right? I have an idea.

Expand the Team Leadership

What if we decide as a group that we want a little more structure on this team, and create a community core team made up of the people who are able to commit to x hours per week of the various tasks involved in running the program? Obviously that would still include the current full-time 4, but just like the core team that makes the software we all know and love (on good days, anyway), we would include people who have some dedicated time donated by their employers, and the self-employed/freelancers who’ve decided to make this a commitment as equally “official” members of the team, where some people do it full time and others are just a couple of hours per week (but they are good hours 🙂 ). If we knew for sure we could count on these people, we could start decentralizing responsibilities that are time-sensitive or that touch sensitive information to be shared by more people. This could get the full-time 4 out of the never-ending pit of backlog/reactive customer support, and we could focus some time on creating tools and processes to make things easier instead of always treading water (sometimes less successfully than anyone likes). Sound like a plan?

I’ve started reaching out to some business owners in the wp ecosystem that seem like a good fit for donating an employee’s time. It doesn’t need to be full-time (though wow that would be great); even a few hours each week can make a big difference if we know we can count on them no matter what. So:

  • If you have a business and would be willing to donate some employee time
  • If you are already volunteering on company time (or your own) and would like to make it official
  • If you are already volunteering but not on company time and would like help convincing your boss that it’s a good idea
  • If you are not yet volunteering but would like to, if you can convince your boss (or are willing to make the commitment on behalf of your own time)

…let me know. You can leave a comment here, or if you’d rather raise your hand less publicly, you can email me at jenmylo at wordpress.orgWordPress.org The 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/. I am happy to reach out to your boss if it seems like a good fit. We’re especially in need of people outside the US for both time zone and language reasons, but also just because our community team leadership should be representative of the community team itself, which spans dozens of countries.

Getting Trained

In the meantime, we are going to start training more people on how to do more stuff here, whether their bosses are paying them for it or not. We’ll do the first of these trainings (video format) on Tuesday, June 16 at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 6pm UTC and cover how to process meetupMeetup 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. group applications and get organizers started with new groups or roll their current group into the chapter account. If this time doesn’t work for you, don’t worry, we’ll record it and post it, and will set up a another training in the future that’s friendlier to the Asia/Australia side of the world. If you are interested in attending the training on the 16th, please let us know in the comments so we can decide which format will work best (hangout, hangout on air+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/., zoom, etc) and we’ll give you the link to join that day. We’ll work out the topics of future trainings as we get feedback from the deputies and can take a more educated guess at which tasks will make the biggest impact if they are shared more widely.

Transparency

When we have more people doing the work, we’ll have more available time to work on things like tools for managing stuff, tracking progress, etc, and we can say goodbye to private google docs forever in favor of transparent information posted right here on this site. But first we need more people we can count on so that we can plan appropriately. Can you help?

 

#deputies, #community-management, #mentors, #training

When is a new mod no longer a n00b?

A long time ago, there was a mod (let’s call him super-mod) who used to schedule all videos for publication, and all the other mods tagged their videos READY FOR PUBLICATION, to let super-mod know that they, well, ready for publication.

That didn’t scale very well, so we implemented what we have now. All mods schedule their own posts, no super-mod needed with one exception: New mods.

For new mods joining our merry band, we ask them to use the old READY FOR PUBLICATION tag so current mods can double check to make sure everything is great, and then schedule the video if it is. After an ill-defined period of time we let these new mods know that they are good to start scheduling their own video, and all is good with the universe

The problem though is that this doesn’t scale well either.

Given the possibility of growing our squad even more, and expanding our role to include other activities like post-production and translation, I wanted to ask you all (new and current mods alike) what you think a better system for on-boarding new team members could be? How can we create a system that makes new mods feel welcome and gives them a place to go for questions, ensures that videos are moderated correctly, and is a little more sustainable than the current READY TO PUBLISH tagging system?

#new-moderators, #training, #wordpress-tv

Please welcome new moderators Alejandro Mozo @woobyn and…

Please welcome new moderators Alejandro Mozo (@woobyn) and Jose Freitas (@josefreitas2)! Alejandro speaks Spanish and Jose speaks Portuguese, so they’ll help round out our staff of moderators who can review non-English language videos and subtitles.

Guys, please review the Video Moderator Manual and watch @myroseapples great instructional video.

Are any of the newer moderators ready to “graduate” to admin and able to mentorEvent Supporter Event 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. Alejandro and Jose? @philerb and @myroseapple, could you please weigh in on that? I don’t want to overwhelm you two. 🙂 Or perhaps longer-time mods like @defries or @maharzan could help mentor this time?

#training, #wordpress-tv

Welcome new moderators in training @lorenzocaum and @metodiew…

Welcome new moderators-in-training @lorenzocaum and @metodiew! Lorenzo applied to be a moderator way back when we had a slow period with videos being submitted, and Stanko applied recently to help us moderate the videos from WordCampWordCamp WordCamps 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. Sofia, as he speaks Bulgarian.

Guys, please review the >Video Moderator Manual and then watch @myroseapple‘s great instructional video.

Have @meaganhanes and @adavis3105 reviewed enough videos to understand the process and be allowed to publish videos without someone looking over their shoulders? If so, perhaps their trainers – @myroseapple and @philerb – can take care of training Lorenzo and Stanko?

Also, have we had any luck finding a trainer for @pr0v4? @ericmann @theadityajain @andrewmorris @maharzan, do any of you have time to help train some new mods?

#new-moderators, #training, #wordpress-tv

Adding another new moderator Andrea Barghigiani username Pr0v4…

Adding another new moderator: Andrea Barghigiani (username Pr0v4) has also agreed to join our merry band. Andrea speaks Italian, which will probably come in handy with all those videos from Bologna still in the queue. 🙂 (Funny story, Andrea is a girl’s name in the US and a boy’s name in Italy. Go figure.)

Andrea B, please read through the Video Moderator Manual and then see about moderating some of those videos in Italian? Also, if you’re interested in helping with post-production, we could use more people there!

Is anyone able to mentorEvent Supporter Event 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. Andrea B? cc: @ericmann @andrewmorris @theadityajain 🙂

#new-moderators, #training, #wordpress-tv

Reposting from Theme School Blog First Module Child…

Reposting from Theme School Blog: First Module: Child Themes of course!

I have been talking this week with Tracy Levesque (@LilJimmi) who is my FAVORITE child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. trainer in the WP world. She and I have discussed her awesome curriculum that she has used to teach child themes at: Philly WPs MeetupMeetup 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. Group, WordCampWordCamp WordCamps 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. NYC, WordCamp Montreal, Girl Develop It Philly, Web Start Women in Philly, & Philly Tech Week. I think it and she are a perfect way to build content for this.

She will be placing an outline + her content that will be fleshed out by us all into a script. I am hoping we can be in agreement and done with it in the next 2 weeks.

I also want to put a call out to anyone who remembers who were in the groups at WCSF this summer. I want to have us place all the documents worked on under the Shared Material page. If you want to contact me you can find me at courtneydawn on gChat or twitter. Thanks!!!

#themes, #training

Introducing wp tv mods in training Al Davis…

Introducing wp.tv mods-in-training Al Davis and Meagan Hanes. Both happen to hail from the Ontario area. Both have also been added to this blog and to WordPress.tv as editors.

Al Davis is a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps 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 and speaker, and also helped create the WordCamp multi-event sponsorship program that’s all the rage these days.

Meagan Hanes is a designer who’s used WordPress since 2005. She’s also a WordCamp speaker.

@philerb, I think Al could be a big help to you and @theadityajain with the oh-so-gentle, post-your-content reminders to WordCamp organizers. Perhaps you could be his trainer?

@myroseapple, I am have some emails out to possible additional helpers for post-production. Do not despair. Do you think you could train Meagan, in the meantime?

#introductions, #training, #wordpress-tv

The One About Training New Moderators

So, we never did get any kind of training documentation started. I have two new volunteers who would love to help mod videos – how shall we get them started?

Suggested process:

  1. Read through the Submission Guidelines.
  2. Read through this 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/. for context and history. It’s not that long. 🙂
  3. TagTag Tag is one of the pre-defined taxonomies in WordPress. Users can add tags to their WordPress posts along with categories. However, while a category may cover a broad range of topics, tags are smaller in scope and focused to specific topics. Think of them as keywords used for topics discussed in a particular post. a video to “claim” it for review.
  4. Watch the video.
  5. Post any questions to this site.
  6. If you’re certain it meets our standards for accuracy and video/audio quality, post to this site that you think it should be published.

For your first 3 videos, your trainer will review the video too, to make sure you haven’t missed anything. After that, you’ll be able to schedule videos for publication independently.

IMPORTANT: We only schedule 3-5 videos for publication per day. This is to avoid spamming all the people who are subscribed to WordPress.tv. Please don’t publish a whole slew of videos at a time, because sadness.

ALSO IMPORTANT: This blog is public, though it does discourage search engines. If a question comes up with a video that might be sensitive, we try to be discreet with people’s names.

Please suggest changes/additions/deletions. 🙂

#training, #wordpress-tv

Last weekend we participated in the Grace Hopper…

Last weekend we participated in the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference‘s Open Source Day in Minneapolis. I, Alison Barrett, and Carolyn Sonnek attended as workshop teachers for the people who signed up for the WordPress section.

Alison led the group interested in working on how to contribute to coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. They went through the setup process with svn, and worked on a javascriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. patch that was submitted on tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.. I pinged Helen and Andrew Ozz to review the ticket so the participants could get an idea for how feedback gets delivered. After lunch, Alison’s group continued to learn about wp core (they mostly had js experience, no php).

Carolyn and I each led a small group in the morning that was focused on setting up a local installLocal Install A local install of WordPress is a way to create a staging environment by installing a LAMP or LEMP stack on your local computer. and learning how to use WordPress (they mostly had no experience with it, coming from programming backgrounds rather than content management). After lunch our two groups combined and we taught them how themes work and how to build a child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/..

At the end of the day we had to get up and show a demo of what our group had worked on, so we threw together some quick posts on a test site I had (because we couldn’t have multiple people contributing to a local install simultaneously) describing some of the activity, and one of the students’ child theme was used. It won’t be representative of the class after next week, but if anyone wants to see what was shown, you can see it here until October 16, 2013 (after which I’ll remove the link and it goes back to being a test site for me).

What we learned:

  • Most of the computer science majors/professionals we met had heard of WordPress but not used it, and didn’t work with PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php..
  • Because of our user/developer dual audience, it’s very difficult to ensure that a targeted workshop will reach the right audience without fairly strict pre-screening. We thought our group would be all people wanting to contribute to core, but 2/3 just wanted to learn how to use WP for the first time.
  • Having mamp and the most recent version of wp on a thumb drive is always very handy.
  • We could have jumped right into using WP if we hadn’t needed to dither with database connection errors etc in mamp/wamp for the first 20-30 minutes. That said, with this audience, they liked setting up the development environment, even if they weren’t going to do anything hardcore.
  • The workshop was the day after the conference proper ended, so some people had to leave after lunch because they were checking out of hotels, catching flights, etc. This is something we see when we do tack-ons after WordCamps also.
  • We really really need to kick it into gear with building curriculums and getting them online so we can start doing trainings of all stripes.

#conferences, #diversity, #grace-hopper, #training, #women, #workshops

I have added pages to our Training blog…

I have added pages to our Training blog. FYI, for those of you who suggested changes to the original topics/curriculum, i have not yet made them, BUT I WILL!! Also if you are interested in volunteering, now is the time! For those of you that volunteered already, you should hear from me soon if you haven’t already.

#training, #training-workshops