Election process and nominations for MakeWP Marketing Team Reps 2024

It’s time for the election of the 2024 Marketing Team Reps.

Here is the timeline:

  • Wednesday, December 6: Nominations open
  • Tuesday, December 19: Nominations close
  • Wednesday, December 20: Voting begins
  • Tuesday, January 9: Voting closes
  • Wednesday, January 10: New Marketing Team Reps announced
  • Wednesday, January 10 – Monday, January 15: 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. onboarding and transition
  • Tuesday, January 16: 2024 Marketing Team Reps begin term

About Team Reps in WordPress

The Make WordPress contributor community is segmented into teams for each area of focus, such as Marketing or Training. Team representatives coordinate team efforts and administrative tasks and facilitate the team meetings and activities. 

“Team Rep is a leadership role that is mostly administrative in nature; it is not a Lead role. Someone who is a leader in a team can lead whether they are doing the team rep job or not.”

Read more about WordPress Team Reps and the Team Rep role.

About the MakeWP Marketing Team Reps 

The Make WordPress Marketing Team has three Team Reps. The Team Reps share team responsibilities and can divide responsibilities as needed. 

Marketing Team Rep Responsibilities

Team Communications and Documentation

  • Coordinate team activities and tasks with other Team Reps and Marketing team contributors
  • Ensure Marketing team tasks, meetings, processes, and decisions are documented
  • Ensure marketing work being done on the team and throughout the project is represented at team meetings and reflected on the team’s 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/
  • Communicate and collaborate on behalf of the Marketing team with other contributor teams and project leadership; openly share this process and information with the full Marketing team
  • Ensure meetings, proposals, and decisions are documented on the Marketing team blog
  • Maintain the Marketing blog, including managing posts and contributor input/comments
  • Monitor the team’s GitHub for new, updated, or closed issues
  • Provide quarterly or biannually Marketing team updates to make.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//updates  

Team Meetings

  • Facilitate the planning and scheduling process for Marketing team meetings on GitHub
  • Facilitate team meetings, with input and participation from other contributors
  • Maintain the meeting schedules and meeting flow
  • Facilitate “Coffee & Collaboration”, an audio/video based 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., to work on Marketing team issues  
  • Maintain the team calendar and meetings postings on make.wordpress.org/meetings

Task and Team Management

  • Assist with updates to the handbook as needed
  • Facilitate contributor access to GitHub, Marketing documents, etc.
  • Facilitate Marketing Tables 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. Contributor Days, particularly flagship WordCamps 
  • Encourage contributors and help direct them to contribution opportunities 

Current Team Reps

All 2023 Marketing Team Reps (@sereedmedia, @robinwpdeveloper, and @ngreennc) are eligible for another term. I (Sé Reed) will not be standing for another term at this time. As such, my fellow Team Reps have appointed me to manage the 2024 election process. 

A New Approach with Ranked Choice Voting

We’re introducing ranked choice voting, ensuring a fair election process. The process will be run via the free service offered at RCV123.org, Here’s how it works:

  • Voters provide an email to receive a verification code.
  • Upon verification, voters are shown a list of all candidates.
  • Voters rank candidates in order of preference.
  • If no candidate has more than 50% of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated.
  • Votes for the eliminated candidate are then redistributed to the remaining candidates based on the next preference on each voter’s list.
  • This process repeats until a candidate has more than 50% of the votes, ensuring that the most preferred candidates are elected.

Note: The email address verification is to ensure valid voting. Vote records will not be connected to the email addresses provided.

Why Ranked Voting?

Ranked voting ensures that your preferences are accurately represented and reflective of our community’s diversity and our team’s intentions. Voting will remain open and public. 

Nominate a contributor for 2024 Marketing Team Rep

Nominations will be accepted as comments on this post. You may nominate others and/or yourself. Please tag your nominee(s) with their WordPress.org username. Nominees may accept or decline to stand for the position.

Nominations will close at 23:59 UTC on Tuesday, December 19, 2023.


Thank you to @ngreennc, @oglekler, and @robinwpdeveloper for reviewing this post.

#marketing-team, #team-rep-nominations, #team-reps

2023 Team Rep Nominations for Marketing

Update December 21, 2023

From the list of contributors who were nominated. Five nominations from the team were received for team reps for 2023 by the deadline. Three of those nominees accepted to stand. A discussion took place on whether the team should have two or three team reps for 2023. As there were three nominees, no election was held. The team reps for January 1, 2023 will be @sereedmedia, @robinwpdeveloper, and @santanainnis. A post welcoming them and reflecting on 2022 will be published in due course.

Thank you to everyone who was nominated and helped support the process, congratulations to the incoming team reps, and thank you to the 2022 team reps, and all contributors who put in time and energy to support the team.

An annual informal celebration of the team will take place, hopefully in the week commencing January 16, 2022. More information will be shared when a date and time is set.

The global Marketing Team meetings will change time and potentially day to enable all the 2023 team reps to be able to attend live. More information will be shared soon.

Update December 6, 2023
Thank you for nominating people for 2023 Marketing team reps. Nominees will be asked if they are happy to stand. Once confirmed, an election link will be shared. A request has been made in the team reps group in 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 the election form to use.

Original post
As we approach the end of the year, it is time to think about Team Reps for next year. We have been highlighting this in team meetings for the last month and encouraging people to consider standing or to become more involved with the team in other ways. Every person in the team, irrespective of timezone or country they live or work in, can express an interest in standing for 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. in 2023. 

Three team reps have served this year, in what was initially planned as a role share but these have been full roles over the course of the year. In addition, there was an overlap for a few weeks at the beginning of 2022 with some of the previous team reps to help with the ongoing infrastructure build and handover. Thank you to everyone involved in 2022.

Below are details of nominations and the timetable for the 2023. Nicholas, Nalini and Larissa, the existing team reps hope team members will consider putting themselves forward for next year.

The team continues to value everyone who is co-ordinating, organizing or helping on a task.

What are Team Reps?

The collaboration efforts across 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/ are divided into teams. They are known as the Make or Contributing Teams. In each of the teams, team representatives can be nominated to help co-ordinate this effort, encourage others, and cover many of the administrative tasks. Read more in the post on what it means to be a Team Rep. Summarizing the definition from this article:

“Team Rep is a leadership role that is mostly administrative in nature; it is not a Lead role. Letting go of the Team Rep title is not a loss of status, just a handing off of responsibilities. Someone who is a leader in a team can lead whether they are doing the team rep job or not.”

In their role, Team Reps in Marketing:

  • Are responsible for communicating on behalf of their team to other contributor teams and sharing this information back with their own team
  • Help represent the team internally, collaborate with other teams, manage the meetings with contributions from others in the team
  • Facilitate the planning process for team meetings 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/ and run the weekly meetings with input from other contributors
  • Contribute to the agenda and notes, encourage contributors to volunteer for note taking and the coffee breaks, maintain the schedules and flow
  • Encourage contributors and address any issues together with others as needed
  • Update the diary post and team calendar
  • Contribute to updating the team’s GitHub, and with others who also give time to support this area, its maintenance
  • Assist with updates to the handbook
  • Monitor the Marketing blog comments, along with other contributors
  • Generally keep a watch on the moving parts of the team to represent this at meetings and update the team’s GitHub

Teams can have more than one rep to enable individuals to share responsibilities, divide tasks, and cover each other when needed.

How do I nominate someone?

Every contributor will need to stand for nomination per year. Any member of the team can stand including those who may have other roles or who are currently reps.

The team can have two to three Team Reps every year.

If you would like to stand or know someone who would be a good team rep, please nominate them or yourself. You can do this by putting the name on the google sheet on this GitHub card #38 or by commenting below.

If you have 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) question and would like to chat with one of the existing Marketing Team Reps (Nicholas, Larissa and Nalini), will be really pleased to talk with you.

Remember that if someone nominates you, but you do not feel like accepting at this time, it is okay to decline. Your nomination will be included in the voting only if you explicitly agree to it.

Timetable for nominations and elections

Please do consider standing and vote. The team reps help the team as a whole to build on the progress and achievements from previous years and all the efforts of contributors since the time the team began.

As there are some major festivals and holidays for those with other responsibilities, we want to enable as much participation as possible in the team rep nominations and elections.

October 2022: start discussions and encourage those who had previously indicated interest to add their name to the GitHub card, as well as highlighting the opportunity to others to start thinking about what they could bring to the role. Check with the project leadership on any new guidelines or processes across the project. [This has been done in the team]

November 2022: encourage nominations and promote in the Marketing Team slack and during team meetings. [This has started]

By 16 November 2022: publish post on the Marketing blog and highlight in the team meeting. [Discussion during meeting]

6 December 2022, 09:00 UTC: close nominations and confirm with those who have been nominated, if they wish to be considered for 2023 before making an announcement on election nominees or results if no election is needed. Share a list of nominations in the Slack and update this post. A link to how to vote, if needed, will be shared during the global Marketing Team meeting. This will give anyone unable to attend an opportunity to vote after the meeting.

14 December 2022, 09:00 UTC: if an election is needed, this will run until this date and time. Results will be announced in the team meeting on 14 December at 15:00 UTC.

Team social, date tbc: invite all the previous and 2023 team reps to a social and thank you on behalf of the team and community. Previous year team reps will also be invited to this. The event will be a creative doodle and sharing of favorite places session, suggested from the year’s social questions.

1 January 2023: New reps will start their role for the year at the beginning of 2023.

Information to help with nominations from previous questions

  • Names for election will be published on the /marketing blog only if the nominee has confirmed they are happy to stand. We would like to share in Slack a list of all those nominated, including those who decided they did not wish to go forward at this time.
  • You can still choose to stand/confirm a team rep election nomination for a future election year if you opt not to be put forward for 2023. Please know that declining to stand will not be a barrier to ongoing involvement in the team / other Make teams, task sub groups, projects and action groups.
  • You can have informal chats with the existing team reps or the projects and action groups members if you are unsure about standing.
  • Members can nominate more than one person.
  • You don’t need to be in a particular timezone nor country/ continent to be a team rep. Like now, team reps come from different continents and timezones.
  • You do need to be on the Make WordPress Slack.

Questions

If you have any questions, please ask in the comments or in the Marketing Slack. This is your team, please take part in 2023 nominations. A big thank you for everyone who considers putting themselves forward.

Thanks to @eidolonnight and @lmurillom for reviewing this post.
The process and draft has been shared on the team’s GitHub and in team meetings.

#agenda, #marketing-team, #team-rep, #team-rep-nominations