Call for design team rep nominations

The design team has never had an open call for reps, so let’s change that! Currently, I am the only team repTeam Rep A 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. and this is a great opportunity to bring someone else on board. This process is heavily inspired by the community team. Since our team is still small, two team reps seem like plenty.

What does a team rep do?

In the WordPress open sourceOpen Source Open 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, each team has one or two (or more!) representatives, abbreviated in reps. The role goes way back to 2012 and is an established one across teams. You can learn more about the team rep role here.

A little note, it’s not called team lead for a reason. While the people elected as team reps will generally come from the pool of folks that people think of as experienced leaders, the team rep role is designed to change hands regularly. Similarly, you don’t have to be considered a lead to step into this role.

I would like to suggest we consider a change in our process and after a year change all team reps. That would mean next year both myself and this new team rep would step down. To handover, we can hold nominations a few months before the term ends, to ensure mentoring. For this round, I will serve as a mentor for the new team rep to help get them started.

Here are the main tasks:

  • Ensuring a meeting agenda happens along with notes. We have note-takers who are not team reps and post agendas, so this is co-ordination. The team rep adds agenda items to a shared document.
  • Run the weekly design team meeting in 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/..
  • Write a fortnightly update post for make.wordpress.org/updates?
  • Give quarterly updates on the team when asked.
  • Triage and keep track of the team TrelloTrello Project 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. inbox. This is used to fuel any meetings.
  • Call for new team reps when the time comes at the end of year tenure.

As a team rep, other tasks might fall to you in order to keep the team running, but in general, it’s a support role. On average the estimated time you would need for this role would be a few hours a week. With another team rep though, that time is shared.

This role is open to contributors of any level, not just full-time contributors. Like many good open-source processes, this work is done openly and can be shared. Also, because WordPress is a globally-minded project, if the team rep that is selected can’t make the current time, we can always discuss changing the meeting time.

The process

Taking inspiration from teams that have done this before the suggested process would be:

  • A call for nominations in the comments on this post. Self-nominations are welcome. These will close in on 27th March.
  • After the closing date votes will be made on those nominations for a week.
  • The votes will be tallied, followed up with people, and then announced.

If you want to nominate someone in private, please reach out to me (@karmatosed) on Slack.

Disclaimer: if you get nominated, please don’t feel like you have to say yes! We will add to the polls only the names of the people that are responding positively to a nomination. So feel free to reply with a “Thank you, but no thank you”.

#team-reps