New Team Rep (also, do we need one?)

Welcome to the official home of the WordPress Documentation Team.

This team is responsible for coordinating all documentation initiatives around WordPress, including the handbooks and other general wordsmithing across the WordPress project.

Want to get involved?

Start here to find out more about what we do and how to contribute:

Onboarding to Documentation Team: An overview of what we do and how to collaborate
Documentation Issue Tracker on GitHub: Submit any Documentation Team-related issues on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/

Weekly meetings

Join our discussions of documentation issues here on the blog and on Slack.

The documentation team holds weekly office hours and monthly Contributor Days on each Tuesday of the month in the #docs 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/. channel. It’s also where you can contact the team at any time outside meetings.

It’s time for someone else to take on the role of team rep! What is the 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.?

The team rep is responsible for posting weekly updates and liaising with the different teams, when necessary. Note that is not a leadership role (though someone who is leading a specific project can hold it).

We should also discuss the following:

is the team rep thing working out? Do we need one? Jen has asked us to reflect on this and report back on it. Please do share all of your opinions.
if we decide that yes, team reps are awesome, how shall we elect one? I can set up a poll if people want to vote. or people can suggest their names and we can discuss amongst ourselves who we think would be best.

Please keep discussion of this on the P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/., rather than having it solely in the IRC chat. This ensures that everyone who has a stake can participate.

#team-rep

Drew Jaynes 5:26 am on January 30, 2014

I think having a 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. is nice, even if the role is really not so much to lead but to represent. And I think doing a poll or a vote is probably still the best way to do elect somebody.
Kim Parsell 5:58 am on January 30, 2014

I definitely think we need to have a 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.. As far as how to decide who the next team rep is, perhaps have people put their name in the comments if they are interested, and then do a poll to elect the next rep.
Siobhan 6:36 am on January 30, 2014

I would like to see a slight change in how the rep communicates with the rest of the project. At the minute the reps for all of the teams simply report on what’s going on in their team. However, the more important role of the rep is to represent the team, getting in touch with other teams when necessary.

Instead of posting a list of things that we’ve done (that I suspect perhaps two people read), the post on updates could be a list of questions that the docs team has for different groups.

A recent example is a discussion that I’ve been having with @dh-shredder about having a vagrant instance for WordPress. I asked because we were discussing making simpler documentation for new contributors, and having one method of installation would streamline the documentation. Other examples in the past have been getting the assistance of the accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) group to write documentation, and asking for input from the polyglots teamPolyglots Team Polyglots Team is a group of multilingual translators who work on translating plugins, themes, documentation, and front-facing marketing copy. https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/. on code examples.

This is exactly the sort of cross-group communication that it would be great to have on the updates blog, and the rep should facilitate it happening. It keeps things transparent and ensures that everyone knows what discussions are taking place. We have the @ functionality so we can easily alert different teams to any questions that we have, simply by asking the question of the rep in the updates post.

It would be fantastic to see the weekly updates become more useful than they currently are and become a focal point for cross-group discussion, rather than simply a stream of stuff that happened.
Eric Amundson 4:49 pm on January 30, 2014

I agree that it’s good to have a 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., at least for communication’s sake. I like Kim and Drew’s suggestions to have volunteers and a poll.

Want to get involved?

Weekly meetings

Share this: