Props to @empireoflight for notes. This post is just the notes, in the second post later today we will include the actual tasks broken down.

Props to @folletto for the sketch during our discussions and @saracannon for the photograph.

• We did an icebreaker: What’s your favorite breakfast, what animal are you?
• Discussed the current state of the design meetings on 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/.. Expressed concern over not enough structure.
• Maybe an identity crisis: are we a team, or are we support for other teams?
• We tend to discuss topics that could be or have been discussed on other team channels, leading to a sense of disconnection.
• Seems to be a lack of leadership in the team.
• We should establish what’s happening/weekly updates, like summaries.
• Proposal: a monthly meeting focused on a specific topic.
• Onboarding is challenging when there isn’t a regular meeting with active participation.
• Maybe once in awhile (weekly?), do a live hangout/discussion with the team reps instead of always relying on Slack for communication.
• Office hours could consist of or be replaced by a triage of tickets.
• This would give new members an idea of what to do.
• Also need to help participants remember what they did. Many people lose track of how they participated.
• We discussed mentorship/buddy system to help onboarding, where an established team member would help a limited number of new people (but not too many), as this has proven to fail, so maybe 4 or so).
• Mentorship should be structured, possibly with outside help (not sure why I wrote this).
• Can we find easy tickets for new designers to work on? Often they are more difficult than they appear on the surface.
• This might not be a bad thing. The goal isn’t to find easy tasks that they can complete, it’s to get them excited about something that feels relevant to them, even if it’s complicated. Don’t worry about failure.
• We discussed difficulty in communicating with other teams about their design needs. Although we could be more proactive about determining their needs, likewise, other teams should be coming to us. BuddyPress was brought up as an example of how design has worked with other teams (successfully, or as an example of the problems we experience? I wasn’t quite sure during the discussion).
• There are a lot of “abandoned” design tasks on tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.. E.g., Dashicons. (Could we review these as potential tasks for new designers?).
• GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ was brought up as the most active current project for designers.
• What about a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area./happy hour/some kind of outreach pointed specifically at WP designers?
• It’s possible that WP isn’t a designer-friendly space. JQuery Foundation was mentioned as something designers successfully participate(d) in.
• “Design First” should be the goal, but often it isn’t; e.g. the customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings..
• Guidelines for feedback need to be established.
• Setting up a metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. sandbox environment is challenging (if not impossible) for designers.
• We talked about areas for designers to get involved: front-end design/development, marketing, and testing
• WordCamps often showcase the work of talented designers. They represent a pool of resources for the project; how do we get them to participate?
• The concept of team reps was discussed. There should be a scheduled meeting between team reps from all channels.
• We need to define who our reps are, and leads. Leads is the tough part; designers don’t often want to lead.
• Can we get designers from the industry, who would be granted time to work on the project?
• This is the case for developers. It benefits their companies when they get “props”. But designers don’t get enough props. How do we fix that?
• Possibly add a section for “contributing designers” to about page.
• Possible remove the categories of contribution, e.g. “Core ContributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org.” or “Contributing Developers” on the about page.
• This became a new topic for discussion to the summit and was discussed later in the day.