Getting Started on a Task

It’s easy to get involved with marketing projects, even apart from the weekly meetings.

New contributor orientation

We advertise the current tasks in the agenda each week on the Marketing blog and during the meeting on Wednesdays in the Make WordPress 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. We also have a post where we try to feature easy first tasks for new contributors. In the notes, we ask notetakers to make it clear where volunteers are needed for current actions and if relevant the skills involved.

Let’s Get You Started On The Tools

All our current projects/ tasks are shared weekly in the global team meeting agenda and during the meeting on Slack. We do this in response to the pandemic as it has had an impact on many of the team, to be more inclusive and enable those in very different timezones to be able to contribute asynchronously, and to try and remove barriers to contributing.

After a trial and testing period, we are moving to use GitHub as our major projects and tasks management tool, and adapt it where we can to meet the team’s needs but also to gain input from other teams that prefer it and did not use 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..

The team’s Trello board is in transition. You can still work on items featured in the ‘in progress’ channel which are categorized by area to particularly help new contributors to WordPress. We will be moving the categories and tags information to use 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/ to make sure we incorporate all the feedback and testing during 2020-2021. If you do not have a Trello account and want to add to an existing card, contact one of the team reps and they will be able to help you. When you make changes to a doc, be sure to summarize them in the comments on the Trello Card for consistency with the date.

If the card has a current task co-ordinator, feel free to message them in the main #marketing channel on Slack to see if there is any more specific direction they can provide to make it easier for you to get started

People contribute as they have time and it’s easy for a card to be stalled. In fact, the backburner column is a great place to pick up a card that was started but not completed.

If you find yourself editing pre-existing text to a doc, make sure you are in suggestion mode so you do not undo others’ work. If you find some copy that you feel can be improved, feel free to make a suggestion in the doc and/or bring it up at the next meeting. We welcome everyone’s input.

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