@peterwilsoncc called us to order and introduced @thewebprincess as the release coordinator and handed the chat over to her facilitation.
The chat started out loosely following the same agenda as the earlier chat celebrating the commencement of the new release and release squad.
This sparked an excited response about having an APAC based release coordinator and a cheeky question about whether or not the release party would now fall into APAC timezones as a result. (Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it).
We also highlighted the same two posts for review.
Open floor
As it was initially a fairly quiet gathering @thewebprincess took the opportunity to ask some probing questions about what it’s like to contribute to core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. when you’re based in the APAC timezones; specifically “What are the biggest challenges to contributing from this part of the world? And what more could be done to help alleviate those challenges?”
There were some great responses to arise out of this conversation, which you can read in detail here.
There was agreement that the advent of dev chat and triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. in APAC timezones have made the feeling of isolation from the core conversations has lessened somewhat which is great to hear.
The regional participants are also really hopeful that having release leadership based in this timezone will be a really positive step forward to increasing the cohort of participants in the region.
We then discussed steps to help improve participation in the APAC region, these were the areas we covered:
- @webcommsat advised that the marketing team have an initiative under way to help promote different meetings – so next steps is for a chat to happen to talk about what that might mean for APAC dev chat (and dev chat in general).
- Making the APAC dev chat a bit more visible by taking and posting notes after the call (we have made a commitment to do this going forward, starting with these notes).
- We then discussed the timing of the meeting and whether moving the APAC chat to before the Americas/EMEA one would help reduce barriers to entry for APAC participants (opening for discussion below).
- Changing the language used to describe each dev chat in order to give them equal weight as a means to help increase participation/perceived value.
Requests for Comment
- The consensus for the members present was that there would be significant benefit in moving the APAC call forward (earlier) by 24 hours. This would mean:
- The agenda notes would need to be posted 24 hours earlier than the APAC call to allow both discussions to follow similar agendas
- There may be an increased need for maintainer teams to add their updates to the agenda post for discussion in the chats as most maintainers won’t be available for the earlier call
- Adjusting the language around how we describe the dev chats to give each equal weight – currently we have ‘dev chat’ and ‘APAC dev chat’ let’s discuss what a more equable format might look like… here are a couple of options that were thrown in to the call such as using UTC time to differentiate chats (2000UTC dev chat or 0500UTC dev chat), using regions – America/EMEA Dev Chat and APAC Dev Chat or something else…
What do you think?
Before making such changes it is important to open this up for discussion so that all interested/affected parties might add their thoughts to the conversation, we’d love to hear from you below if you have anything to contribute.
#5-6, #dev-chat, #summary
