Community Summit 2017

The Community Summit is coming up on 13-14th June in Paris, linked to 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. Europe. It’s a small, discussion-based event where face-to-face conversations take place about subjects and issues, sometimes difficult to discuss online. This is not a Contribution day. Those involved also have a duty to feedback to the rest of the team, you won’t miss out if not there.

The Design Team at the summit

We will be sending a team to the summit like other teams around WordPress. This will be a small group of people, no more than 10. Nominations will be finally decided by the team reps: Mel Choyce, Michael Arestad, Joen Asmussen and myself. The selection will include a range of factors including: diversity of opinions, diversity of people, inclusion, activity of that person within the team, speciality in a topic we’re discussing and also the benefit of their voice to an area being discussed.

Someone from team helping the summit

The team organising have asked for people from each team to step up to help them. Unless anyone has objections, after chatting with other reps that will be myself. The idea is by having members from each team we can ensure our team has a voice and increase the diversity of those organising the summit.

A suggested list of topics

A while ago, we asked for topics and as a result of that and some sorting, we now have a list of suggested topics. We will be using these to nominate people to come to the summit. So what are they? They loosely split into sections like this:

Onboarding

  • Contribution days: how can we have a format that works for even when a designers isn’t there (this relates to onboarding)
  • How do we make onboarding easier for designers? Pattern libraries, interactive Codepens?

Retention

  • Retention of designers: why do we have such a low rate and what can we do about it?

Outreach

  • Diversity: how do we reflect the diversity of our users in those designing.
  • How do we make space for all designers? Design is a wide subject with many roles. How can we make space for UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it., UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. and beyond?
  • How do we recruit beyond our community? To thrive we need to connect more and reach outside.
  • Outreach inside WordPress: how can we find and also send designers easily to all areas of WordPress. If we are the design team for all of the community, we need to address this and outreach.
  • Design Philosophy – what is it? Are we expressing it publicly in ways that attract other designers?

Process

  • Pattern library: the need for this is getting more, how can we make it happen
  • How do we establish a proper design process across the entire project of WordPress?
  • How do we establish a culture of productive design critiques?
  • How do we make research part of our process?

Role

  • How can we, as a team, best support the design needs of coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., and the design needs of the community?
  • What does it look like for WordPress to be design-led, and how can we as a team lead that effort?
  • How is the Design Team, or WordPress is general, impacting design in the world? What are we planning to do proactively?

What next?

It is good to give feedback on the topics. Anything missing we should be discussing? We can chat about this in this week’s meeting which will be at a different date this week:

Friday 17:00 UTC in #design.

We have to respond to the summit post by Friday, March 3rd – so we will be making a decision as team reps from the comments here and discussion in this week’s chat.