Marketing team meeting September 25, 2019

2019/09/25

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/. Timestamp: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p1569420109202500

  1. Attendance: 
    1. @mikerbg @michelleames @DijanaMuzhdeka @mapk @yvettesonneveld @karmatosed @webcommsat @jenblogs4u @nullbyte @maedahbatool @Maziar @scottjones

2) Notes

  • Notetakers: @webcommsat and @yvettesonneveld
  • Ideas:
    • in the future, attendees will be asked to add their 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/ ID to their attendance confirmation if it is different to their Slack ID. This will assist notetakers.suggestion to be trialled: members attending the meeting, if they wish, to add their local time and time zone in relation to UTC, the common time zone used in the project. This is to support awareness of time zones of participants and to aid team working.
  • Update on Notes of meetings:
    • @yvettesonneveld and @webcommsat are working on options to make the meeting notes more effective and useful for both new members, those who may be contributing async, members unable to attend and seeking to catch up on actions, other teams and external audiences.
    • in the interim, a more streamlined minutes will be produced with a link to the full notes on Slack. The Google documents notes from the last meeting were available on the drive for members to read and this link was shared. Last week’s meeting was unusual as it had virtually two sub-meetings taking place within it in addition to normal updates. The notes are therefore quite extensive. Thank you to @webcommsat

3) New members welcomed

@mapk ; @DijanaMuzhdeka joined from her first 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/. at 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. Nijmegen

4) Celebration thread

  • Slack training for supporting new contributors
    • Event: An example of 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. based Slack training has been piloted at WP-Pompey in the UK. This will produce feedback to work in Make WordPress and community on ways to improve the onboarding / tool familiarization for new contributors. Thanks to Drew Westacott and xxx for other teams working on ideas for a template.Outcomes: Many of the useful tips shared in this training and its structure could be adapted for contributor events. Potential follow-ups: A potential marketing idea is to encourage local Meetups to do Slack training before a Contributor Day in the area to enable new attendees to benefit more and move to tasks earlier. Action: If anyone else runs sessions on using Slack which could be shared, add it to the onboarding cards on the Marketing 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.. We learnt a lot about how some of this can help at contributor events too and make slack more fun to get to grips with. (Update from @webcommsat)
  • Event: Marketing Table, Contributor Day WordCamp Nijmegen 2019 last weekend. 
  • Event: Virginia Beach WordPress Meetup 
    • Outcomes: Through marketing this is gaining momentum with attendance averaging 15 people each meeting. A good result for a new group (Update from @mikerbg)

5) WordPress 5.3 Release – Marketing planning

5.3 Release Communication Update

This update comes from the 2019/09/25 Marketing team meeting. An agenda will be posted on 30 September for the 2019/10/03 meeting. 

5.3 Release Collaboration Meeting Objective

Objective: to use this meeting to review this document and review the proposed edits. We have had a lot of great feedback from other teams, many of whom have helpfully added content directly about their components.

On Monday, the expected Beta2 release, we will start the process over. This will be an iterative process as we approach release, but things get more and more stable as we approach the main release. (Update @miker)

Overall focus of the release

In the 2019/09/18 Marketing meeting, a number of questions were raised regarding the “main focus” of the release. This was clarified on 2019/9/20 by @francina:

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/ definitely deserves a very important place in the list of features but IMHO is not the main focus of the release. Nor is the theme, again according to me 🙂 As we said in the launch of the release cycle the focus is “polishing current interactions and make the UIs more user friendly”. If I had to sum it up, I would say that 5.3 is a release focused on enhancements, from Gutenberg, to a new default theme to media library. What do you think?

About Page Collaboration and Feedback

A major focus of the Marketing meeting was revising the current draft collaboration document. A number of feedback items have been incorporated over the last week. We reviewed the feedback and made a number of changes, while adding comments for further discussion. This is a work in progress and iterative document:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PW52syWz1bksFInmgczZA5OKhEGjM2dXGwNA6A5tl-M/edit# 

Suggestions from the team:

  • @yvettesonneveld suggested a readability check in the Hemingway app to make sure the reading level is at or below grade 8. @miker ran the current copy through the app and found it is currently at a 9th grade level;
  • @audrasjb requested a specific section be added on 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), which was endorsed by @francina;
  • @karmatosed raised concerns that the current document did not accurately reflect the full range of Gutenberg enhancements for the release. @youknowriad agreed and added in a list of main features, as well as starter
  • @mikerbg will compile an update on the current status of the About page to share with the major releaseMajor Release A set of releases or versions having the same major version number may be collectively referred to as “X.Y” -- for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, and all other versions in the 5.2. (five dot two dot) branch of that software. Major Releases often are the introduction of new major features and functionality. team.

Images / Feature Illustration

Points on GIFs:

  • @mapk raised a number of points related to the animated GIFs currently in the About Page collaboration doc, and added specific comments directly in the collaboration doc. The GIFs were made at an earlier stage and no longer completely reflect the current stage. Feature behavior or 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. is slightly outdated in these GIFs;
  • @mapk did not think there was a formal process for creating these images. They had been created by a few of the Devs in local environments. He offered to provide the GIFs if we continue in this direction. He advised that to his knowledge there is not currently a guide or process for making these images. He has used LICEcap or Monosnap to create them in the past;
  • @webcommsat suggested the conversation on a guide for creating or requesting GIFs should be a conversation initially with the Design and the Accessibility teams. There has been information from the Accessibility team previously to help particular WordCamps before, there may be more resources. Checking with these times would be better and could potentially save time;
  • @karmatosed raised the concern that the impact of GIFs should be looked at collectively to consider their combined impact. She also stressed the importance of collaboration with the Design team on the overall direction of the design.

The conversation will be continued in the existing tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. thread: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/47708 

The meeting ended without consensus on the next steps. @mikerbg expressed that his objective was to follow the lead of the Design team, and was approaching the task with the idea that flexibility was required as there will be multiple revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. needed as we approach release.

5.3 and Social Media

As we approach the 5.3 release, we have had a number of conversations about using various social media channels to spread the message. This raised a number of questions about the current channels, and how we can interact with those:

  • a draft document was started by Maziar bringing together some of the general ideas for more proactively posting on social media. This was a starter which members were invited to add to and to make it more specific to the Marketing Team. The more time sensitive task was the survey to encourage members’ contribution and ideas (more in the minutes from last week’s meeting). Maziar working on a draft survey and to report back next meeting. 
  • For the next few weeks, we focus on helping to generate some post ideas for the 5.3 release and the Digital Citizenship week content specifically.
  • @webcommsat: We need a separate document on social media messages for the release. Perhaps this could be done on a Google sheet so that we can re-tailor messages for the different social media accounts. This would also make it easier for members to take messages and use them on their own social channels. @@mikerbg will create this doc within the Marketing google drive and share the link in the marketing channel on Slack.

This conversation is ongoing.

6) Marketing Communication and Next Steps

Background:

  • In a number of weekly marketing and more detailed meetings, work has started on ways to improve shared understanding and communication flow within the marketing team, how it communicates to other teams and wider external audiences, and responding to feedback from members, from contributor events and other teams.
  • This includes how we record meeting notes, communicate project status, and provide a roadmap of planned next steps.
  • This conversation is in conjunction with the wider strategic re-organization of marketing processes already under discussion.

Actions: @webcommsat was asked to develop some options. She is also gathering further examples and will have conversations with @yvettesonneveld and @mikerbg, @maedah, gathering input from others too, and incorporating feedback from members and at WordCamp contributor events. The main immediate action item is to treat the marketing meeting notes more as a high level overview of activity, instead of a granular “transcript” of the meeting, retaining a link to the full discussion in Slack. A summary of this will be posted at the next meeting on Wed 2 October 2019.