Notes: Global Marketing Team meeting 17 January 2020

Re-post.

Welcome to the Make WordPress Marketing Team meeting. This note captures the key areas from the meeting and asynchronous discussion to assist others in taking part and contribution on marketing from other teams.
Full 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/. meeting link: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p1579100431150100

Notetaker: @webcommsat

Attendance: @siobhanseija, @harryjackson1221, @webcommsat, @maedahbatool, @jonoaldersonwp, @oglekler, @darls, @simonasn, @megphillips91, @passoniate, @nullbyte, @antialiasfactory, @mta1, @simonasn, @carike, @kashifgabol
If you attended or contributed to this meeting asynchronously and are not listed above with your 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, please contact @webcommsat or @yvettesonneveld so we can update this list. We ask members to please add their WordPress.org ID if it is different to their Slack ID into the attendance thread or at the start of any task update during the meeting as finding the correct WordPress ID can be difficult and time consuming. Thanks everyone for your help with this.

1) Google document tips to help with onboarding

Introduction to task

@webcommsat from the WCEU 2020 Contributing Team and lead of contributing events marketing sub group.

Aim of the task

What we are looking for is input/ examples / FAQs on using Google Docs to help new contributors at WCEU and reduce barriers to contributing. These guides will be able to be updated and translated through a process 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/ by other WordCamps and the wider WordPress community. This new facility in a WordPress area on GitHub has been recently agreed. Thanks to @chanthaboune and Francesca Marano, Tammie Lister for this, and to everyone who inputted on this in the contributing events marketing sub group meetings.

Who can contribute and how?

  • How? Add comments to the 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. board, add ideas to the card or the DM @webcommsat https://trello.com/c/I62iDEJO
  • Who? Everyone in the marketing or community team who uses Google documents and sheets for the WordPress project is welcome to contribute to this task.
  • Helping people with using Google Docs is an important part of our onboarding and working on tasks.
  • If you are new to using Google Docs and have questions about how to use it for WordPress collaboration or are an experienced Google Doc collaborator from other environments and have tips which could be shared to help people get started, we would value your input.
  • This may be a potential task for someone new to the marketing team. We will also need to help test the information we produce and translate it.

Questions on using Google Documents

  • What documentation is needed to help new contributors use Google Docs to collaborate on blogs or notes?
  • What are the typical questions we hear from new contributors at events or in meetings as they start to get involved?
  • Do you have any examples with optional screenshots of problems you have found or tips for using Google Docs collaboratively?
  • Are there any examples which can help others unfamiliar with using Google Documents in this kind of collaboration, for example, adding comments, signing in, using suggestion mode?
  • From your experience of collaborating on documents in the marketing team, have you had any specific difficulties or found solutions which can be shared?

Some of the issues and questions highlighted by marketing team members:

  • how to sign-in to a document to help task leads or other collaborators interact with you or ask a follow up question
  • how to set up a document in the right location, that is, WordPress marketing folder (for us) or how to check where it is being stored (so that it is in the right team folder)
  • what it means to edit in suggestion mode and how do you check you are doing this
  • how to check your spelling when you add your comment or draft a document
  • how to make a suggestion in wording that can be accepted rather than someone having to retype it
  • how to make a suggestion in wording that can be accepted rather than someone having to retype it
  • is there a way of reading and responding to each comment individually within a Google document without all the other comments on the same or adjoining text appearing. This can make it difficult to get a sense of the sentence and comment in question and the whole piece. It can also cause confusion in following the comments. Any input into helping with this query is particularly welcome as it has been regularly raised by members during onboarding, when contributors first start working on a document, and task leads. It has also been highlighted by a few members as causing an 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) barrier.
  • do you have any other suggestions or examples? All welcome.

Why do we use free and widely available or open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. tools?

Why don’t we use tools like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel or one of the proprietary content specific collaboration tools which can have more features, audit functions etc?

  • Tools like Google Documents and Sheets are used to help with access, ease of translation, and to avoid cost being a barrier to contribution to this open source project. Through improving how we use and the support we can provide on Google tools, the marketing and other teams hope to get more use out of its functions, and avoid some of the problems with lost text, follow-up discussion with collaborators, improve the contribution process for a document.
  • If others know of other open source tools which we could also be used, please do share this with the team.
  • If we can help answer the questions new contributors and task leads have when dealing with Google Documents, it can be more positive for how we collaborate together and reduce some of the barriers we know members have experienced.

2) Contributor events marketing group

Ongoing discussion: Contributor events ideas for onboarding

  • Encourage contributor events to publish agenda with more detail before the event, where known.
  • 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. teams and Make WordPress teams try to prepare subjects beforehand, but it proves hard. Sometimes what can be used at an event will depend on who joins the table and what communications can be done with attendees before the event to help with preparation and encourage set up of tools, the bringing of equipment, multi-language support and extra support for new contributors. As part of the preparation, we need to prepare a mixture of tasks, ranging from something for writers to those who want to contribute to idea creation or review.
  • Onboarding takes a significant amount of time at contributor events and this can affect who is available to support other tasks on the day. We are working in the group and with the team reps on continuing to improve onboarding.
  • 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/. meetings differ between WordCamps and what resources they have, the experienced contributors that are available to assist others on the day, and the language support that may be needed.
  • We have a contributor event marketing group which is working with other teams on ways of helping camps put on contributor events and work with the teams on materials. There’s been a lot of progress on this and with the agreement for using GitHub initially for onboarding materials, this will also help.  The community team is also reviewing some documents, and some work with other teams on finding ways of listing events. 
  • The WCEU Contributing Team is also working on even more ways to support contributors this year and sharing from the experience of WCUS and others.

The WCEU contributing team is working on collaboratively producing guides to help new contributors including those new to teams that use Google Docs, Trello, GitHub and other tools. Many camps have an onboarding stream or dedicated table which also helps people coming for the first time.

Reply to questions to encourage members to support the work the team does at Contributor Days

  • Single day events which are part of a WordCamp have their own ticket booking process and are often at different venues to the main conference. These tickets may not be released at the same time as the main WordCamp ticket. They are only available to those who also book for a WordCamp ticket.
  • There are also some standalone contributor days which are not linked to a WordCamp. They are great places to get involved and meet other contributors.
  • We have a planning process for materials and tasks at contributor events we are able to support. We are also working with other teams and WCEU on onboarding materials which will be held in a central repository on GitHub. Link with @webcommsat and @yvettesonneveld if you are planning to attend a forthcoming event and may be able to assist. There are also opportunities to support the group working on contributor events marketing including for members who have multi-language skills.

2) Content the open source approach blog

Task lead: @harryjackson1221

Trello task: https://trello.com/c/dELGoIP8/317-content-the-open-source-approach-blog-post

Google document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a6bi0ztc10xKsewHlDWUKcEjyGXm1dJNYA7adNwO69g/edit#

Please add to this document which we think will get some good traction in the WordPress community focusing on optimization plugins. Add your Slack ID to the bottom of the document.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, add yourself to the card (and put your name and WordPress.org ID in the document).

  1. First blog post – initial due date 5 February 2020, to ensure we have this content ready for review and publication.
  2. @harryjackson1221 has access to a sheet where everyone shared their time estimates for the inclusion of the class and data attribute. This will mean the post can be launched when most of the plugins have released the compatibility feature.

Meeting finish and thanks

Thank you to everyone for their contribution. Please do continue to work on tasks inbetween our meetings and to add to the topic threads if you were unable to attend the meeting itself. Next Global marketing team meeting Wednesday 22 January 2020 in the Slack channel from 15:00 UTC.

#contributor-day, #contributor-event, #google-documents