Contributor Afternoon Antwerp 2018 – Design table recap

On 2 and 3 March 2018, WordCamp Antwerp (Belgium) was held for the second time. We had around 50 people attending the Contributor Afternoon. The focus for this day was on CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., Documentation, Support, Community, Polyglots and Design.

It was my first time as a design table lead, and we had four people in total attending the design table in various shifts. After a short introduction and explaining about the communication and documentation structure we currently use on Slack, Trac, Trello and the Design blog on make.wordpress.org, we looked into what tickets or projects could be worked on during the afternoon.

First, we looked at the expertise present at the table, and what people would like to do. We looked at the call for design for icons and plugin headers, but good documentation on this call was missing (at the time of writing this is improved and clarified on Trello by @cathibosco), so we moved on. Since one of the attendees wasn’t a designer but had loads of marketing experience, he looked into trac tickets he could give UI/UX-feedback on. In total, 5 tickets were responded to.

Another attendee had both design and development experience, and worked on new dashicons. Thanks to @empireoflight for responding very quickly to the new contributor’s questions via 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/., 2 fixes were made for dashicons.

Toon, Gijs and Monique at contributor day antwerp 2018

Toon, Gijs and Monique at Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. Antwerp 2018

By the end of the afternoon, we had 2 more people joining the design table and we discussed what type of work is done by the design team. There’s still a misunderstanding that design is only about ‘making something look nice’ and that you cannot contribute if you can’t draw. We busted this myth together, emphasising that contributing to the WordPress design team means contributing to the overall user experience of people using WordPress.

In the end, we evaluated the afternoon and talked about how easy people find it to contribute to design. Overall, contributors said they really needed the explanation given this afternoon on the used channels and their purpose. As well, the long list of blogs on the make.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//design landing page isn’t very inviting to read through.

We concluded that it had been an educating and interesting afternoon and people were inspired to continue to contribute online.