Marketing meeting 2019, November 27

Meeting timestamp 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/. for full notes

https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p1574866812428300

Notetaker: @mikerbg

Attendance

@mikerbg, @maedahbatool, @dhruvpandya, @Megphillips91 @oglekler, @webcommsat, @aurooba, @scottjonesukcom, @yvettesonneveld, @nullbyte, @grafruessel, @antialiasfactory, @mta1, @passoniate, @FahimMurshed

Welcome

Welcome to the WordPress Weekly Digest from the Global Marketing Team.

Traditionally, we have provided more of a historical recap of what was done during the week. Moving forward, our objective is to shift the focus towards summary with actions which make it easier for other teams and those who can’t attend to catch-up  and use the slack link to read more about a particular aspect. A collection of copy is also being designed to be shared (via social media or other channels) with end-users. 

We want to cover the same great things each week, but shift the focus to be sharable directly with end-users or WordPress Partner Organizations (WPOs). This will take some time to fully complete the transition, but we are excited to have a vehicle to share the WordPress story more directly with the people that use it every day. 

WordPress Release Schedule Announced

Update: @mikerbg
After a strong and well-voiced request from the WordPress community of developers, the WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team have published a tentative new release schedule for the next three years. While tentative in terms of the specific dates, this newly published schedule gives developers time to consider their own product timelines and reactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. appropriately. 

With more than 35% of the web depending on WordPress for their online platform, application or webshop, users have become louder in expressing the need to be able to plan for new releases. New releases need testing and tweaking, and the more complicated the install, or the more installs a business/ organization manages, this requires careful planning. 

5.4 – April 21, 2020

5.5 – August 11, 2020

5.6 – December 8, 2020

5.7 – March 9, 2021

5.8 – June 8, 2021

5.9 – September 14, 2021

6.0 – December 7, 2021

Community Updates (formerly celebrations)

This section will highlight some of the many outstanding events and interactions that make this community special. We will be looking to move away from length recaps of events (which are typically shared with multiple existing channels) and towards short blurbs that highlight specific events or interactions. 

The goal here is to shift how we talk about the community by focusing on short form (tweet length) updates that can be shared through multiple channels. The tone and focus of this section will be very positive to celebrate the community. 

Local WordCamps go Global

Contributor Events Update: @webcommsat
Marketing team contributors have been working on a draft model to support contributor events in local areas and help overcome barriers, such as language, timings, post event follow ups. They have also explored how to encourage inclusion and longer term contributing within the team as part of the offer for the marketing members at contributor events. Feedback from materials produced for and at marketing tables have been used at subsequent events. It has also been used to create a draft model on how we can work with and support local organizers and find more ways to involve marketing team members and their skills. 

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. Milano 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/. last weekend built on and tested this developing model. It incorporated feedback on the approach used at recent marketing tables including Dublin, Stuttgart, Zurich and others. It also incorporated work on this area which started with marketing table support for Contributing Days at Glasgow, Zaragoza and Milano last year. Resources and tasks are prepared in an easy to access way, supported by online slack support from global team members. Where it has been identified as useful, an online video / call facility has been set up to support the local team and others working on similar tasks. The tasks and resources included an awareness of local needs and linked in with local organizers and facilitators. 

This approach enabled:

  • a live slack “drop-in” facility with global team members able to provide support in addition to local on boarding arrangements. Where useful, this was supported by an online “drop-in” video or call facilities. Contributors and marketing team members (including task leads, marketing members with relevant local language skills, others working on the same tasks) were able to use this link. Contributors used these facilities to:
    • say hello
    • ask questions
    • overcome technical issues not possible to be resolved easily at the event
    • get some help with translation of an instruction
    • get more onboarding support or find areas as new contributors they would like to work on
    • support and work with local organizing teams, and marketing contributions better linked to the current work of the team.

This developing model helped:

  • provide a smoother and more positive contributing experience according to feedback
  • improve the onboarding experience and overcome some of the barriers
  • provide a link between local organizing teams, locales and the global marketing team. For example, in Milano, two of the fluent Italian-speaking marketing members were not available to help as planned on-site due to circumstances beyond their control. But the rolling preparation for contributor events, ready resources and drop-in access via slack and other channels was able to be expanded. It allowed marketing members to be available to help remotely to assist with preparation or answer questions. They were also able to link in with arrangements set up locally to help with language queries
  • support the local language and locale needs, and enabled a better communication between the event lead and the marketing team. For example at Milano, the event information and summary from the marketing table were provided in Italian as well as in English, thanks to working with Italian speakers leading or attending the event
  • raise awareness of the language barrier for contributing to global tasks and the importance of having a rolling cycle of contributor events planning
  • make the marketing table at recent contributor days even more inclusive
  • to start or continue conversations with local teams about (1) producing / signposting marketing and resource information on contributing in other languages and (2) translating tasks or key instructions in other languages in advance of events. This in turn can help to reduce some of the barriers for camps considering putting on contributor events
  • to avoid the extra demand or pressure on one or two members of the global team in being available for all contributor events. It enables more marketing team members to be involved and offer their linguistic skills within a marketing environment

Thanks

We were able to use and gather further feedback on the draft model working with Giovanni Invernizzi and others in Milano. Thanks to everyone who fed into this during the months, and especially @zetaraffix, @aurooba, @michelleames, @yvettesonneveld, @siobhanseija, @kmarcink, @mariajaragon and @nullbyte for their ideas and contributions over time and sharing their knowledge.

For marketing at WordCamp Milano 2019 Contributor Day, we:

  • identified WordPress benefits from product developer/ creator perspective which could be used for marketing. This built on the work in Dublin and will be followed up with @scottjonesukcom who is helping to lead this
  • reviewed marketing videos and had a few people sign-up to continue working on this and to subtitle
  • lots of questions answered on contributing to marketing and good conversations to encourage contributing
  • ideas for helping local communities get involved with global marketing team to help with the work in this area
  • some sustainability questions and how to market it better with language differences 
  • more feedback on the Contributor Orientation Tool
  • suggestions on how sponsors’ document could be adapted for smaller camps
  • ideas for helping new people contribute 
  • encouraged take up of the 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/ user survey
  • continued conversations about ways to support Italian-speaking contributors wanting to join or were in the global marketing team. Ideas were shared from the German-speaking marketing team and other areas
  • input into many other marketing tasks.

    Special thanks to @webcommsat who prepared and led the Marketing aspects for Milano and Giovanni Invernizzi, who led the Contributor Day. Thanks to @antialiasfactory who supported on the ground co-ordination at Milano 2019 and provided a welcome during the event to new contributors. Thanks to all those who helped with translations and in preparing many of the tasks or answering questions in Italian and English. And to everyone who joined the marketing tasks on the day.

WordPress.org Homepage blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.

More work was done on this task, led by @yvettesonneveld. This task will go back to the 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. Team when completed. 

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. card https://trello.com/c/dwUQFidM

Changes to wording were looked at to provide three key points of information and to help more users access the content.

Suggestion that this block is re-reviewed for every future WordPress release to make the key points specific to the latest release. This could also tie into the themes which link with the musician that the release is named after selected to name the release. (@mikerbg).

Thanks to contributions to this document: @mikerbg, @yvettesonneveld, @Aurooba, @scottjonesukcom, @Megphillips91, @mta1