Community Summit 2023: Your Role in What’s Next

The 2023 WordPress Community Summit has come to a close, marking another milestone in our journey to shape the future of the WordPress 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. project. While the event itself was a whirlwind of ideas, discussions, and collaborations, the real work — building upon these insights and translating them into action — has only just begun.

Notes from each Summit session are now available at make.wordpress.org/summit. For your convenience, you can view a complete list of Summit sessions along with their corresponding notes here.

We don’t want this to be a one-way conversation. We urge everyone in the WordPress ecosystem to delve into these notes, share your comments, and encourage others in your network to do the same. Your feedback is not just welcome – it’s essential. By sharing and discussing these notes with your teams and fellow WordPress enthusiasts, you’re ensuring that our collective vision for the future of WordPress is inclusive and well-informed.

Let’s continue to shape the future of WordPress together. Your voice, insights, and passion are what drive this project forward.

#community, #summit-2023, #team-reps, #teams

Community Summit Discussion Notes: Creating WordPress Curriculum and Educational Experiences

From the session schedule:

One important way to welcome new users, builders, and extenders of all ages is to create excellent curriculum or educational experiences around WordPress. To address this gap, the WordPress community has held KidsCamps and launched Learn WordPress. This discussion will focus on the future of WordPress education, from topics to teach, to levels of experience, to curriculum for specific age groups.

Facilitator: Benjamin Evans (@bsanevans)

Notetaker 1: Courtney Robertson (@courane01)

Notetaker 2: Kim Coleman (@kimannwall)

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#summit, #summit-2023

Community Summit Discussion Notes: Increasing contributor recognition and celebration

From the session schedule:

WordPress contributors are incredible. How can we better acknowledge and celebrate the important contributions made, and recognize the impact they have for the WordPress 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. project? This discussion will explore where we currently are not recognizing contributions, and how we can more appropriately and readily show appreciation for contributions and contributors. 

Facilitator: Julia Golomb

Notetaker 1: Jonathan Desrosiers (@desrosj)

Notetaker 2: Bigul Malayi (@mbigul)


Raw Notes

  • Current state of props across project
    • Props are not uniformly tracked across various teams.
    • CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. does the best job, but only on the SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/. side with “Props x, y, z.” in commit messages.
    • All contributions boil down to 1 prop, regardless of the amount of effort invested or overall impact.
    • Props are collected during betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process./RCRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. of each release cycle. Some of it is automated, but a good amount of manual work involved.
    • Inevitably there are always contributors unintentionally left out.
    • Different teams have different ways to recognize contributors.
  • Original purpose of props in a core release: to recognize lots of work that is not apparent by just looking at a commit (design, testing, code review, etc.).
  • The goal was to incentivize behaviors we want to see from contributors.
  • Why are there invisible contributions at all?
  • Other open source projects were discussed:
    • Drupal: Attributions are discussed a lot.
      • Drupal.org pages can be used as a resume. Not as true for wp.org.
      • They’re highly automated.
      • There are different ways of breaking down one issue into multiple phases instead of one epic.
      • Credit can be received multiple times for each ticket (testing, coding, designing, etc.).
      • can create sub tasks for the Drupal Conference. Like Logo creation, financing, writing articles on event sites etc.. Once the task is finished the credit will be shown in Profile. 
      • The Drupal profile has many type of credits & attributes 
      • More easy access to the statistics of the contributions
      • It also has a dashboard for contributors 
      • Credit is weighted.
      • Some attribution farming occurs.
      • Different contributions based on experience. There is a structured phase out of credit to try and encourage positive progression to more advanced contributions.
      • Drupal embraces company and organization involvement, giving recognition to corporate entities that contribute.
      • Drupal allows enterprises to create profile pages like this – https://www.drupal.org/agileana. Their contribution is also listed like an individual. Like Sponsorship, Supporting Contributors etc.. 
      • The profile page also have section to list the mentors of a user 
      • Corporate citizenship is weighted by the last 90 days, affecting how they’re displayed on drupal.org in a few ways.
      • Is this what Five for the Future is meant to do? Different discussion, but does there need to be more incentivization for companies to participate?
      • Drupal uses a “novice” tag instead of “good-first-bug”
    • Linux Foundation has a badge system used to give attribution.
  • Why are credits not grouped by team or separated out on the Credits page for a release?
    • That page was meant to reflect everyone who contributed positively to that specific release. Who pushes that release forward?
    • Drupal has team recognition unrelated to a release.
    • Other teams have been left to send credits to release squads or figure out their own methods to give credit.
  • Where do we currently give credit outside of a release?
    • wp.org profile Badges
    • #props channel 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/.
    • Translators receive credit in a separate section on the credits page when a non-default locale is being used (though this is tied to contributing to a specific version number
    • Openverse does not have a formal way to recognize contributions besides badges.
    • This Week in Core posts on make.wordpres.org/core
  • Commits are not always the right way to recognize contributions or quantify effort.
  • Badges are a form of credit/props
    • Each team is on their own to come up with the qualifications to receive a badge.
    • There is a good amount of badge hunting that occurs.
    • Badges are one thing that makes wp.org profiles more like a resume.
    • Majority of badges are currently assigned by role.
    • Training team has a great outline of how to receive a badge with task and count requirements outlined. They were praised multiple times for their related processes and documentation.
    • Some teams are less structured.
    • Photo team gives out badges as soon as someone shares a single photo in the directory.
    • There are gaps in badges that can be given out.
    • All flagship contributor days have virtual contributor days. Could add a virtual 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/. badge for those folks unable to travel.
    • Could explore tiered or “super user” badges to encourage contributors to advance and contribute more.
    • Teams should decide what is appropriate for them for issuing badges, but having documented best practices, or guidelines would be helpful for this.
    • Badges are binary in nature. How can we add nuance, leveling, etc..
    • Some teams have multiple badges. Openverse, for example, has team and contributor badges. But most contributors are sponsored. There is a higher threshold to cross for unsponsored folks. There is a disadvantage.
  • Badges could have an expiration period
    • This would discourage badge hunting.
    • Incentivize the actual behavior we want.
    • They shouldn’t disappear entirely, though. They were important and valid for a point in time, and that history should be preserved.
    • Badges could also be active or inactive.
    • Expectations and removal criteria must be clear to avoid mix ups and hurt feelings.
  • It’s important to recognize contribution where it matters to the person investing the time and effort.
    • There are times when both external and internal recognition are important
  • Where else can contributors be recognized that may be more impactful?
  • Releases are not the event to recognize for all teams within the entire project.
    • Some teams work on different timelines. Have different deadlines, etc..
  • Props chasing does occur.
    • How do we nudge people to make more substantive contributions as they learn and grow?
    • Sometimes this will be an indication of the limits of their skills.
    • Contributions are accepted in all forms from everyone, regardless of size, perceived impact, or team/component.
    • It’s totally fine for someone to find a comfort zone where they are happy and live forever.
  • The Lead Developer title currently does not really mean anything. Especially to new contributors.
    • Previously, this may have incentivized some folks to work harder. But it’s currently unattainable.
    • What else can we offer along these lines and at what levels to hopefully incentivize better?
  • There are considerations to be had around sponsored vs. unsponsored contributions.
    • The number of hours is not a great way of quantifying contributions either (see 5FTF).
    • It’s difficult for contributors to meetups, WordCamps, etc. to quantify a regular amount.
    • This creates a perceived disadvantage to self sponsored folks vs. sponsored ones.
    • Being sponsored by a corporation to contribute is recognition in itself. That is meaningful to many in the community but not all.
  • Visibility and transparency into contribution should be a goal.
    • It creates a cross team understanding and excitement for collaboration
  • Quantifying contribution is difficult and not uniform.
    • Writing make posts can be a big deal that can require days of work.
    • Creating well worded and detailed issues can also be time intensive.
    • See above about it being difficult for contributors to meetups, WordCamps, etc. to quantify a regular amount.
    • Design team does a ton of work that’s not represented in the final deliverable. Wireframes and design iterations, for example.
  • For 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/, it’s difficult to juggle 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/ vs. TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/./SVN.
    • Code commits are easiest but a very small piece of the puzzle.
    • Docs commits are gamified the most with typo fixes, etc.
    • Hard to decide who should receive attribution for changes.
    • Discussions, triage, etc. all deserve credit.
    • Gutenberg recognizes contributors for all public pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party version releases.
  • Could the People of WordPress series be used to recognize contribution efforts as well as unique contributor journeys?
  • Can the release page be expanded to recognize different groups?
  • Legacy people are important to all aspects of what we do. How do those contributions get properly recognized?
  • Having strong clear automation helps avoid bias. Anytime a human gives credit it opens the door for some bias, whether intentional or not.
  • WordPress has a bad habit of being internally facing and not interacting with other communities. What can we learn from mistakes and triumphs for other projects and communities?
  • Who is the audience for the recognition types being discussed?
  • Be very clear about problems being solved. 
  • How do people find out who to talk to about what?
  • Titles represent recognition to peers.
  • Badges represent recognition for self or prospective employers.
  • How to recognize work in siloed communities
    • Travel funds could be a form of recognition to enable travel.
  • Emeritus committers is a potential example of how to have an “archived” or “inactive” contributor state.

Key Points

  • Fair and accurate recognition is a key to a thriving open source project. Contributors must feel valued.
  • All forms of contribution should be recognized.
  • Behaviors that the project wants to see should be incentivized by any credits system.
  • Contributions need to be recognized where it matters most to the contributor.
  • There are different audiences for different types of recognition.
  • There are many different types of contributors (unsponsored, sponsored) with many different backgrounds (design, development, translations, testing, etc.).
  • Releases may not be the right event to celebrate recognition for all teams.
  • Event organizing (WordCamps & Meetups) takes lots of time and effort, but receive less recognition.
  • Any credit system adopted must stand on its own, independent of the tools being used.
  • There should be as little invisible contribution as possible.
  • Strong automation helps avoid any potential bias.
  • Contributions are not weighted by level of effort or difficulty.

#summit-2023

Community Summit Discussion Notes: Iterating on the Team Rep role

From the session schedule:

Today, each Make Team has a few Team Representatives (often referred to as “Team Reps”). Historically this role was not a leadership position, but designed to help facilitate communication across teams through weekly updates and cross-team discussions. Over the years, the 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. role has shifted and now differs from team to team: on some teams, Team Reps are only responsible for setting weekly agendas for meetings and posting recaps. On other teams, the Team Rep holds mentorship responsibilities. This discussion aims to a explore stronger definition for the Team Rep role, including responsibilities and what skills might be helpful, and where in the contributor journey they should be.

Facilitator: Angela Jin (@angelasjin)

Notetakers: Jonathan Desrosiers (@desrosj), Benjamin Evans (@bsanevans)


Discussion Objectives:

  • Create a stronger definition of the team rep role
  • Consider how team reps can be better supported
  • Consider how folks can be helped to become better team reps

Key Points

Community Summit 2012 is where the role was initially discussed, and should be revisited.

  • The role was originally in charge of communication and project management, and represented the team to the project.
  • Was not about prestige.
  • Considering the size of the project today, the role was created for a smaller subset of groups than what we have now.
  • Was created when 6-8 teams existed, at most.

What is a team rep?

  • We need standardization and a stronger definition of what we want/need the role to be.
    • Learn.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/ can be used for standardization.
    • At the same time, some teams have found the team rep role does not work.
    • Some think the rep role should be limited to admin tasks, while others think it should be limited to project wide communication.
    • Variation in the role definition is good (teams are making it work for them). But these differences need to be clearly documented.
  • Some folks do it because they want to serve, but sometimes also because there is a need.
    • Some people are rep for too long because they can’t pass it on.
    • Sometimes it is hard to make it look attractive.
  • For some teams, it’s very difficult to be an unsponsored contributor and serve as a team rep.
    • How can this barrier be removed?
  • It should be a role folks grow out of.
    • Teams should have a clear progression path (contribution ladder).
    • If folks are doing it for recognition, then there should be other means of recognition.
  • Projects need leads to get stuff done, but there is history behind not calling reps “leads”.
    • There is a difficult balance of democratizing, and pushing things forward.
  • Ideally, team reps shouldn’t need to know English
  • Having diverse reps can ensure global coverage.
  • Some teams require a higher level of trust and vetting, such as Security or PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party Review teams.

Teams can do better at setting reps up to succeed.

  • New team reps need onboarding.
  • Clearer expectations and outlined responsibilities.
  • Teams need documentation on the role, and also how succession is made.
  • Teams should strive towards a diverse group of team leads
    • Stagger term limits so that there is both an experienced and non-experienced person
    • Have reps from different time zones
  • Teams should have separate folks assigned to inter-team collaboration – such as project managers.
  • Keep working groups in mind when defining what a team lead is.
  • The project can empower new teams to get up and running with representation more quickly with stronger definitions and better documentation.

Improvement ideas for make.wordpress.org/updates/:

  • /updates/ was created as a place for reps to communicate with each other.
  • Access to the site needs to be managed better for new team reps.
  • This needs to be better marketed so that non-reps also know it and follow it.
  • Great spot to get the birds-eye view for what teams are working on.

Suggestions to improve the rep role:

  • Send Welcome packs to new reps, welcoming them to the role and setting out clear next-steps.
  • Have Rep/Lead Camp – a point of accountability and connection.
  • As there are many teams now, we should group teams and have someone represent the group.

Have the responsibilities outgrown a single role?

  • Is there a need for multiple kinds of reps (project manager, communications, etc.)
  • Is there a need for both internally and externally focused reps?
  • Does this involve directly responsible individuals? Another team is working on a proposal for what this could mean and how it could work.

Conclusions/Summary:

  • Most teams have the following needs. But how much falls under the responsibility of the team rep role, and how much is conducted by other active contributors, differs from team to team.
    • Team Representative
      • Represents the team to the wider Make project, and the project to the team.
    • Project Manager
      • Accountable to “get things done” within the team.
      • Aggregates ideas in the team in a format the whole team can follow easily.
    • Administrator
      • Conducts general administration for the team.
      • Collects stats about the team’s performance and projects.
    • Mentor
      • Onboards and mentors new contributors.
  • Teams need to clearly define the team rep role in their team and set up a succession/onboarding process.
    • Guidance or “templates” from the larger program could assist with this.

Community Summit Discussion Notes: Open Source participation in global legislation

From the session schedule:

Historically, the WordPress project has avoided taking clear public stances on legislation as it appeared across the world, instead relying on our sustaining/underwriting corporations to advocate for the best positions. Increasingly, WP is being asked to weigh in or participate in taking a collective stand with other FOSS projects in our field. Are our current methods sustainable? Do we have the community backing to make this sort of broad claim?

Facilitator: Angela Jin (@angelasjin)

Notetaker: david wolfpaw (@wolfpaw)

Notetaker: Erica Varlese (@evarlese)

Raw notes:

  • As we’ve learned from Spider-Man: with great power comes great responsibility.
  • Some questions to address:
    • What questions do we have on the topic and what context would be helpful to start the conversation?
    • What kind of government regulation/legislation are we discussing? Global, such as EU, GDPR, etc.
  • While a lot of legislation is starting in Europe, such as GDPR, it is going to evolve and spread to other parts of the world, as that already has.
  • What do we currently do, how we can improve it, and is it sustainable when it involves participating in legislation.
  • How reactive versus proactive should we be in the project for legislation: just reacting to legislation as it comes up, or making suggestions for future legislation.
  • We need to find an official home within the structure of the project (Make Teams) to have legislation related discussions. The Sustainability Team has been brought up as a suggestion. Without this anchor of a team, transparency becomes untenable. We need to set some sort of framework for a process when it comes to thinking about these issues.
  • Russia is considering a law to make it illegal to work with a foreign non-profit. What does that mean when it comes to volunteering with the WordPress project? We have to be proactive since we can see it coming. It’s not just high level discussions on code and security, but on who can participate in the community.
  • When we respond to requests, how do we ensure that we are capturing the community.
  • We might want to measure how likely legislation is to pass before determining if we should get involved.
  • We should not only be discussing legislation, but how else we can or should be involved with other governmental activities. For instance, should the WordPress project respond with amicus briefs on cases being brought before courts, such as what some technology projects have done.
  • This in part goes to the idea of, “decisions, not options”. Are we an opinionated project or not? Should we put out these amicus briefs, or just respond if something affects us. We can say that we have talked about things as a community, and generally agree on some action/idea and publish that to Make.
  • WordPress could say, “this could affect these sites, this source code, etc”, and the greater community could take this information and act on it. Not making the statement so much advocacy, but opinions that could facilitate action that the community would not have to take explicitly.
  • As a community we need to lobby a little to be reactive to things that exist like GDPR, and to make changes in WordPress. For instance how we need to be more open about security in the project because we will need to due to upcoming legislation.
  • We need a space to explain what is happening with specific laws when it relates to our community.
  • As a 501(c)3 we cannot be seen as doing any sort of lobbying.
  • What would a proactive response from WordPress look like? – The most important thing to be proactive about is deciding about what is important to address. Legislation that we are looking at is very broad, and could be globally reaching, or even more locally, such as Montana banning TikTok. Deciding upfront which things that we care about, and then looking for how we can get involved. We should not feel intimated or that there is a barrier, but work on conversations where we can participate in with our domain knowledge, such as on 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., contributors, security, etc.
  • We don’t want our contributors, especially self-sponsored contributors who make smaller contributions, to be responsible for legislation. We have a majority of contributors in the EU, and we want them to be able to contribute for as long as they would like, as safely as possible.
  • The difficulty in knowing that silence is safety versus silence is complicity is how much it affects us as a community. If other CMS reactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. to something, WordPress either has to respond, or not responding could be seen as tacit disagreement.
  • Would it be beneficial for WordPress to explore consultative status at the United Nations, with the office of NGOs
  • There was a position taken concerning contributors and the EU, and there will need to be other positions taken in the future. If someone takes a position on behalf of the community, it needs to have the support of the community. Perhaps we could create a structure where discussions happen, for when positions will or won’t be taken.
  • There are so many times when individuals or sponsored contributors take positions, and the rest of the community can feel left out and that their discussion and feedback does not matter.
  • There are so many issues that the community could comment on: Black Lives Matter and George Floyd, gender, sexuality, war. How can these translate into advocacy? We can have a conversation of how far we go. Human Rights are important, but how far do we go as a community?
  • There is an assumption that Make teams are representative of what we call the Community. The challenges of representing the community is that people are represented, but that is not representative. That could be an issue with whether representation is ever possible. We are asking some big 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. of people but it won’t represent everyone.
  • How do we flag things for WordPress to review. How do we see what things that we should be concerned about, what should be the structure to do this advocacy work, and how do we keep it sustainable.
  • We cannot be representative of the entire community, and decisions have to be made, otherwise not making a decision is a decision. There will be some subset of people who make opinions that are representative of the WordPress community. Majority cannot make opinions that cover the Minority.
  • Right now, someone says, “hey, has someone looked at this?” and shares it to Matt or Josepha, and we react.
  • What could a process look like: Someone raises a question to Josepha or Matt, but maybe there is a group that could have a process.
  • Is the process broken enough that we need to make a system? We need specific people to agree to make positions. Perhaps it is not a process worth iterating on right now.
  • Leaning on the fact that the community is global would be nearly impossible to track things in countries where we don’t have as many contributors or do not speak the same language. Even putting out, “this is what the process is” without adding structure could be helpful to ensure that people know how to be heard.
  • Our motto is “democratize publishing”. But we are not going to be a direct democracy in the project. A representative democracy would better serve us by having community members who represent parts of their community. The only thing that is missing right now is garnering topics from the community. One on one conversations are valuable, but can be negative because it excludes people by its nature.
  • As an example there are regular town halls in some communities that people can bring issues up to that are not specifically about one problem, so that people can bring up any of the issues that they have to be addressed. The conversation component as a community is what is missing.
  • If something comes out of a discussion that the community cares about, it will become a big thing regardless.
  • Looking at how we can improve the process: what we need is a space for people to share in one space, and where people can comment on things that are happening in various parts of the world, with various legislation, etc.
  • Voting would be tricky, but we do have tools available, such as polling.
  • One issue is that the more things that we take positions on, there are more things that we have to take positions on. For instance we take positions on human rights issues in some places, but not in others. We could look to where we have the most contextual authority as a group of contributors to comment on positions.
  • When you pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” someone about a problem asking for position, keeping in mind whether we have domain experience. The recent issues of open source contributors being legally responsible for projects is something that is important to this community, but maybe something like agricultural bills is not important in the same way for our skills. The bigger your grasp gets, the further that people want you to reach.
  • We want to ensure that what we are adding is impactful, like having teams and representatives on squads for a purpose, not just because everyone should have a voice. Having people have to reach out to whole teams takes time that could be used for other pressing projects.
  • When we lead through example, it is powerful, and that’s something that we can control.
  • We don’t think that the community would not understand wanting to keep a narrow focus on things that directly impact the project, and we can define that. Things that matter as an open source project.
  • Some people will want us to talk about everything, but we can filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. that out and just focus on a clear scope of things that will directly impact the efficacy of the project. Open source things, infrastructure things, security things that directly impact CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..
  • It is clear that there is a distinction between, “Stuff that WordPress supports”, and “Stuff that WordPress makes a statement about”. Statements about some law that affects someone doesn’t change things, but ensuring that the community is supported matters more.
  • Following this conversation, what are the things that we care about to make a statement on:
    • Four Freedoms of Open Source
    • Things that affect the openness of the internet/web that affect our users
    • Things that affect the ability to participate/use open source software
    • Security, personal security, encryption
    • AI Ethics
    • Legislation that might affect the content that we have on our various platforms, like on OpenVerse, Learn, Photos
  • WordPress tries to have human-centric approaches to dealing with modern technology and projects. Working your way through the project can teach you a lot about this. We look at open source as you can take it into the world, not just with WordPress itself.
  • It can be valuable to share how things are done when it comes to taking a position on behalf of the project. That way even if we don’t address something as the community, we have guideposts on how to respond on an individual level to take action.
  • If we don’t have a discussion as a community, then it will be seen as just Automattic’s position when a statement is made. Even from a perception standpoint, this is an issue.
  • If conversations are being had but people don’t know where they are or how to get involved, it can seem as if they were not able to have an opinion.
  • Some mechanism for Make teams to be notified of legal decisions coming down that would need to adjust what the teams are doing would be helpful to have.
  • A barrier to get involved in discussions is being able to parse all of the details, length of research and statements, etc. The summaries can be placed somewhere that more people can see.
  • Possible next steps:
    • Designate a place for these conversations to happen.
    • Draft a “Here are the topics WordPress would address” document.
      • We had a lot of discussion, so it may not already be apparent.
    • A method of communicating to the Make teams when there is something with legal ramifications or something we’ll need to deal with.
      • Summaries of what’s happening to allow people to get involved in the discussion.

#summit, #summit-2023

Community Summit Discussion Notes: Communication and Collaboration – Finding Your Way Around WordPress

From the session page:

The WordPress project both generates and processes a lot of information on a regular basis. Even for tenured contributors, it can be challenging to know where or who to go for much needed information. On each team and across the project, who should be responsible for disseminating information, and how can communication practices be streamlined to make collaboration more seamless for everyone building WordPress? This discussion will explore current friction points and possible ways to address communication and collaboration in the WordPress ecosystem.

Facilitator: Kevin Cristiano (@kcristiano)
Notetaker: Jessica Frick (@jessibelle)

Discussion Objectives

  • Explore current problems we face when communicating across teams
  • Explore possible solutions to address the identified friction points

Basic Summary

The Community faces a number of different challenges where communication and collaboration are concerned. Whether it manifests as duplicated work across teams due to a lack of communication or simply dead zones where discussions are purposely kept behind closed doors, these friction points cause real issues on all teams. While most agree we need cross-team communication, many don’t know where to go or what information is missing.

Action Items / Next Steps

  • Members from different Make teams need to work together to develop a proposed process for more public communication and coordination.
  • An ethical standard and code of conduct should be established to determine what information can be kept private and what we have an ethical duty to keep public.
  • We should update our definition of the community to reflect what it is today, including the roles and power therein, as this informs the communication internally and externally from reps, members, and beyond.

Full Session Notes

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#summit-2023

Understanding contributor leadership roles in the WordPress open source project

Across the WordPress ecosystem, contributors can take on various leadership roles, such as release leads or lead organizers for Flagship WordCamps. However, it is not well understood how individuals are selected. This discuss will help build stronger undrestanding of how various leadership roles are created and individuals selected, with a focus on how to better share that information.

Facilitator: Aaron Campbell (@aaroncampbell)
Notetaker 1: Emma Sophie Young (@emmaht)
Notetaker 2: Bigul Malayi (@mbigul)

TLDR: We need more documentation

Raw Notes:

LIST OF GOAL EXPRESSED FOR THE DAY (open floor):

  • How are CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. committers for core projects chosen?
  • Confirmation of how committers from the core team are identified and how they are added to or removed from that role. Also include:
  • How they get into those positions
  • Core releases and roles (historically) how they can shadow to be active in the future ones
  • Get answers about how they are nominated in the future
  • How team reps are chosen
  • How other teams chose team reps, and team leads
  • Get as much information – to take it back to teach students (mentoring high school and college) – make a curriculum around WordPress and opportunities
  • 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. responsibilities – a lot of team reps go more into a team lead role, rather than driving what the team is doing, project managing the team
  • Should there be an additional team role – other than the team rep role (applied to all teams)
  • In a lead role – the person wasn’t aligned or didn’t have the correct expectations of what their role intended
  • What are the objectives of each role
  • Locale meet-up organizer – would like to talk about this in a more traditional sense
  • In addition to getting people to stick around and contribute
  • Figure out how to find out if someone is “worthy”
  • How to trust and give access – gut vs science

CORE COMMITTERS ROLE (and what that means)
Commit many years ago: the way it decided at the moment:

  • Committers 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
  • Committers use that to discuss the act of committing
  • If someone is asking how to do this using ___ (tool)
  • Contributors are proposed to commit
  • Decided by Matt – he has the final say on who gets to commit to core
  • It is a leadership role at the moment
  • Back when the only way to contribute was to code – it was a natural way to become a “lead”. But now it’s different, and there are more ways to contribute.

The committers need to make the decision if it’s something that is ready to go to core. They are happy with the code, and then it goes into wordpress core.

  • When you commit the code – you take responsibility for it
  • Review other’s code, not just use your own; whatever you sign off, you take responsibility for it. So, if there is a problem, you need to help fix it.
  • In terms of the process – it used to be more in the background, but now it’s more transparent. The existing committers see a committer doing good work, they will propose this person, and then Matt decides (there is influence from other committers)

Is there diversity in how the next leaders are being chosen? Because the current leaders are the ones that are choosing the next leaders – is this a problem?

  • There is no rule that a non-committer can not suggest someone. But it’s just not really happening. It would be interesting to see what it would look like, or how it would go.

In order to be nominated – you need to prove yourself – this can take a lot of time, effort, ability to collaborate, etc. So, there is almost a natural selection for this.

  • The time aspects
  • Seems like the majority of committers are sponsored
  • It can be hard to have the time
  • You don’t get commit because you are sponsored, but you have more time to spend on commit (because you are sponsored – having more time each week)
  • Example: Non-committers were nominated by someone else

A gateway can be a co-lead or specific part of a release (almost like a first step) – people can prove themselves during these stressful weeks and hopefully get a nomination from that.

About the Handbook page – that lists who all of the core commits are. It lacks insights on the role of lead developers vs core commiters and what they are tasked to do.

  • Historically, they are “decision-makers,” a true DRIDRI Directly Responsible Individual - the people who are taking ownership or responsibility for a particular project or feature.
  • A DRI is not necessarily the POWER to do something but has the correct context
  • Do you have that “big picture”?
  • Do you have the trust of the community, not because you have all the things but because they know that you can not know all of the things, but that they trust that you will be honest and say, I don’t know, but I will find the answer for you

A lead – needs to handle feedback well (receive the feedback, commit to disagreeing, and move forward)

  • TLDR: We have context, trust, and authority
  • ^^ this was when there was a release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release., and now there are teams
  • We have built other parts of the project up and organized a better – this role could have easily been phased out
  • Lead – was like “water” across projects. – however, the nature of it has changed.
  • The lead role has become irrelevant these days – others may feel a vacuum, and people do not feel like they are
  • If it is a relic, it should know how decision were made, and how it happens within the project, can be helpful, so we are aware of everyone is working and what they need. Not all power to one person, have help

Team reps discussion – team rep role – to facilitate roles – is that really what they do?

  • Idea of what team leads can do?
  • Do not mix up the team
  • A revision on leads
  • Re-grouping of what we NEED
  • The talk of non-code leadership looks like

Team rep vs team lead

  • Someone who is responsible and accountable for the work being done
  • They don’t need to do it (delegate)
  • But they are accountable able (thus responsible)

HOW OTHER TEAMS CHOOSE REPS
Community Team

  • We look at the contribution, consistency, frequency, and how long they have been there, and then we open up nominations.
  • A person needs to be qualified to nominate another person
  • When a new contributor joins the team – where do they fall on the ladder
  • How long will it take to climb the ladder or level up
  • I want to be pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party team rep (ex) 0 what do I need to do to do that
  • Showing people the path on how to start is very important
  • In the past – we dont say we expected you to only do this with this type of code – it’s more self-directed rather than a predefined path
  • Didn’t want to constrain people

REP VS LEAD
Rep for Make teams

  • Leading as well
  • Facilitating
  • Guiding, rather than making decisions
  • Leads for WordPress releases
  • Responsible for making decisions

Polyglots TeamPolyglots Team Polyglots Team is a group of multilingual translators who work on translating plugins, themes, documentation, and front-facing marketing copy. https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/.

  • Nominations in the past – 1 time year there is a reminder to nominate
  • Put up a post with a poll (2 or 3 at a time)

Team rep vs team lead – historically – we had 7 team reps who were mentors (which is like a lead/leadership role)

They were conflated – there was an opportunity to get more people in (in the broader leadership role) and get a fresh set of eyes

There is no documentation on how to become a lead or leadership role and what value it can bring – bring clarity – bring in new people

It’s hard to help if you don’t know how to help or where you can

QUESTION: community and major events – how are organizers chosen are there any gaps there?


HOW ARE LEADERSHIP TEAMS CHOSEN FOR FLAGSHIP – WC TYPE ROLES

WCUS – Angela is head of local events – works with it now on who will work on it next year. Then they will help talk to and build the team

  • There is not an open call for leads
  • We attempted to hand pick who showed the varied abilities that we needed
  • It worked pretty good – there were struggles
  • It was hard to be open – making sure you are really covering all the necessary things that you need – and that the people really understand what they are getting into.

The general path:

  • People volunteer
  • Part of organizing team through the open call
  • Then what they see they are in to – move into leadership in the future release
  • Volunteer – organizer – lead organizer (anglea is the one to work with the person to pick the first and build from here)

LOCALE SITES – Another leadership
The first step – was translating WP into another language (German) – ex – there was a merge for core to translation – there was a lot of responsibilities but not guide or rule book, so she had to chat back and forth how to do this. Now how things have evolved over the last decade. DO we have a process on how to do this for locale sites – if you have access or get it, you are almost in a leadership role, how do we deal with that, since you are basically in a leadership role.

In Spain – its been the same locale managers since the beginner (15 years maybe idk). Maybe they think that they control the local community.

  • They have the sense that they have the power inside the locale site.
  • There is a lack of meetings and a lack of talking inside the locale community
  • Example: recently, they tagged someone said they were tagged out of a project, without telling the person. They took away access because they weren’t awre that someone was working on something.
  • We need to work on this on different levels.
  • We have a lot of things in movement.

For The team reps – the last definition is from 2012 – but there were only like 8 teams back then, and now we have 22, so we need to re-design because the commnuity has grown a lot, and the way it works now is not the same way that it worked 10-12 years ago.

  • We need to re-think how we want to – before it gets worse in the future because it will get worse

HOW DO WE ATTRACT THE NEXT GENERATIONS

  • Handing out knowledge, when someone is stepping down from a leadership role

how to transfer knowledge, what are the responsibilities, and what they need to do (core is documented well) other teams don’t have offboarding from a project or a team. We need to implement a blueprint or skeleton form teach team on how to handle this as well.

  • There are a lot of long term contributors, some day we wont be contributing (or leave the project for whatever reason) – so in order to let new contributors grow, but also get new generations into the project. There should be a wp project that the younger generations are engaged and wnat to contribute.
  • Gen Z are not interested in 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. or WP. How do we approach this generation’s shift into projects, leadership, representation roles, etc.
  • How do we get them involved (already been talked about in other sessions)
  • Related parts – even if they are here – how do we make sure that we are passing the information from one person to the next. And that these insights don’t just age our of our projects and aren’t lost.

Core committers have mentors and that person guides you through the process – it can be overwhelming.

  • Mentorship is good for onboarding
  • There is another part to that
  • They dont leave by surprise but they are working their way out
  • How do we retain all the important stuff or as much as possible

You can pass down some knowledge – but what gets done depends on the people involved – so there should be an understanding that if you hand off the reigns to someone else, you need to be ok that they might take it in another direction.

  • Portland example: meet ups – were some combination of passion and business to run the meet up – this was the energy that drove it forwards, then foundation come forward and was like here are the rules you need to follow – and a leader stepped down because they took the fun out of it
  • The outcome is from the energy of people involved

What is the stance on the wordpress foundation

  • there are other projects (local teams) is responsibility on locale teams or are the guidelines on how the locale teams SHOULD run themselves – not sure if there is documentation on all of the process ( historically there has been less documentation then there is today) – in the past there wasnt as much need as there is today – there were less people and everyone just knew all of the information that they need. Documentation is WAY more essential.

Knowledge transfer and documentation

  • We should be documenting – in the same spirit of open – sources the ethos
  • It should not be “im just talking to you”
  • If im saying it, i should be able to write it down
  • If someone wants to fork this projects – they should have all of the knowledge
  • As we build these structures – we are adding more speedbumps
  • How do we keep up with the quality and balance it?

QUESTION: When we talk about leadership roles and titles – who are you thinking about that for? Is the leadership who is the motivation for? Is this yearning for leadership roles and tiles about retention, and attraction? Personal satisfaction – knowing who to talk to.. Each requires something slightly different. This is important to think about when we looking for what to come out of this.

QUESTION: do you think of titles as trailing or leading? Do you think of a title as something that comes when you are already doing a job? Or something that you want to achieve? For yourself?

Passing leadership knowledge to the next person

  • Practice makes person
  • So we should do it more regularly
  • Not waiting until someone is dying off (bad example)
  • Every 1, 2, 5, 10, whatever years, where they hand off the information to the next generation
  • Capping somehow you can be a lead – might one way we can do that
  • LOCAL – this might not be ^^ a good way – tis is run from passion – but project wise

DRIsDRI Directly Responsible Individual - the people who are taking ownership or responsibility for a particular project or feature.:

  • This is a form of communication.
  • You step up into something, you dont really lead it.
  • Its times into the energy of things. If you want to do something in the project, then you become the DRI. BUT you actual work, depends on your energy and your motivation – depends on you.
  • As DRI you need to make a plan for it. No one will nominate you but you. You look at leaders, they have the energy and the passion.
  • Onboarding – we have a proper offboarding process – if you are a supporter and you dont want do it anymore. They remove accesses – etc

LOCAL teams are meant to be a translation of the main site, it should just be a translation – shouldn’t be an open leadership (basically). It should be managed by polyglots team.

LOCALE MEET-UPS – this is the leadership, organizer role, that is held by WP central, core organizers (wp central steps in looks for replacement) – look for new people to take over the new meet ups.

  • Who is running the newsletter? On the local blog bc its not translation – like the locale make blog – put it into the handbook – since its not a translation – it should be responsibility for the locale test teams.
  • Someone who has a leadership role, they should share their knowledge (give access, appoint people etc)
  • The locale manager, should be the highest role for the locale community. But there is a separate side – there needs to be a POC – guide – content generation, locale handbooks, and rulebook for locale communities because its not very clear for each commmnuity.

UNOFFICIAL LEADERSHIP ROLES

  • How to wind down a project – there are no guidelines, no documentation
  • What should outreach look like, unofficial cross team, idk if they are leadership roles – but it feels like it. And the pros and cons
  • There are a number of people who do just take on a role, and someone starts to make decision, without a “role”, there is a point where you step over a line, and you haven’t be given a “role” – there is a bit of risk in assuming a role (people feeling the vacuum)
  • Keep in mind that we started in a locale community (at least a good amount of us started) – meet up, locale word count, you learn themes, etc.

you know there is global team vs local team.

  • We need to think in the locale community – are not only the translation of the wp site – at least right now – need to push a lot of information in other languages outside of english.
  • People want to contirnbute in code but they need help and mentor – but we need to start thinking how the english part, because right now the community is getting old, and we need to go fishing for new people in locale communities,.

ROUND UP

  • We will continue to talk about this in our teams
  • We are making progress – there are struggles and issues in each project
  • Working through it together and going back to our teams and pushing to improve, formalize, and come up with a process for these things anywhere that we see these gaps.

Things to think about moving forward:

  • Is there diversity in how the next leaders are being chosen? Because the current leaders are the ones that are choosing the next leaders – is this a problem?
  • Team rep vs Team lead role. Clear guidelines to what they do and don’t do, who is responsible and accountable for what work?
  • For community and major events – How are organizers chosen are there any gaps there?
  • For locale sites: Do we have a process to evolve the leaders in each locale? or are they the same for the past 15 years? We need to re-think how we want to change it before it gets worse in the future.
  • How to hand over knowledge and transfer knowledge when someone is stepping down. We don’t have an offboarding system.
  • Gen Z are not interested in open source or WP. How do we approach this generation’s shift into projects, leadership, representation roles, etc.
  • How do we attract the next generations into the WP project?
  • What is the stance on the WP foundation? with the local teams? what are their responsibilities? are there guidelines on how the local teams should run themselves? – Is there documentation on all the processes? (also for local handbooks or rulebooks)
  • We need documentation on how to wind down from a project.
  • How can we document knowledge transfer
  • When we talk about leadership roles and titles – who are you thinking about that for? Is the leadership who is the motivation for? Is this yearning for leadership roles and tiles about retention, and attraction? Personal satisfaction – knowing who to talk to.. Each requires something slightly different. This is important to think about when we looking for what to come out of this.
  • Do you think of titles as trailing or leading? Do you think of a title as something that comes when you are already doing a job? Or something that you want to achieve? For yourself?
  • For locale meet-ups – who is running the newsletter?

Part I & II: Communicating…

Part I & II: Communicating on Make Team Blogs: discussions, proposals, announcements

From the session page:

The WordPress community communicates primarily across 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/. and Make Team blogs, commonly referred to as “P2s”. Make Team blogs in particular see an assortment of updates, discussions, proposals, and announcements. How do these come to be, and how can people provide feedback? How is the feedback considered when decisions are made? This discussion will focus on best practices around conversations on Make Team blogs.

Facilitator: @helen
Notetaker 1: @emmaht
Notetaker 2: @harmonyromo

Discussion Objectives

Discuss the current processes within the Make Team Blogs, what can be improved, how can the community be sure to reach a wider audience before making decisions.

Raw Notes

Best Practices on Make Team Blogs (P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/.) Part I

Current Pain Points:

  • Why do the Make Blog comments not use the 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. Editor (Answer: eventually it will happen – but if there are any questions, feel free to drop in any Slack channels to ask)
  • Raise awareness for blindspots that (newer) contributors have
  • Proposals – There isn’t a defined process in place. Often, the way a proposal is presented makes it seem like it’s in motion.
  • There is no discussion about the process to get to the proposal, no step-by-step path, and there is an implied authority when posts make it 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. P2.
  • The feel is that with a posted proposal, there is an implied absolute direction that a project is taking.
  • Some improvements are needed to be more considerate of other teams. Community members should have the mindset to consider what team should be included in certain decisions and proposals
  • New contributors don’t know about the existence of the team blogs.
  • There is a feeling that you must be proficient in English to partake in discussions. Possible solution: A translation button would be helpful so others can get involved
  • Slack is harder to follow (since information is always flowing and things are always updated), rather than project-based or 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/ issues
  • If you’re only contributing a few times during the week in small increments, it’s hard to find how discussions across Slack, GitHub, and Make connect to see the full picture. No one is really keeping an eye on things as a whole.
  • (Newer team reps) – when to keep the conversation going vs when to post on the blog. Do I link to the slack? Do I link to the github?
  • Lack of guidelines or general practices
  • Lack of visibility and ability to chime in on what other teams are doing.
  • Cross team decisions – project wide governance.
  • Proposals go up at varying times, no order, and ask for feedback for proposals, but the timeline for said feedback varies (no standardization) In comments, don’t have a standard way of moving forward, just simply look for criticisms.
  • When writing proposals (feature →) to pin the top comment (sometimes used and sometimes not used) – you can pin the comment that says “here is the decision that was made”
  • Ensuring that we are allocating the proper amount of time to comment – especially for the people who are not consistently contributing / more part time
  • Are there standards for who can write comments & how do other open-source projects manage this ?
  • RSS updates page (not linked anywhere) – any github repo that is not attached to any team – RSS are not being reported to any team right now
  • Who is our audience – what belongs on /updates (make/latest this will get you RSS updates) and make/projects
  • Who gets access, how do we ensure that people get access? And do we ensure that this happens?
  • Dealing with a working group vs a team, need an interim website to run surveys, (no make/blog yet), need survey tools to help with decision making. It’s a shame when decisions are made simply on Slack, versus seeking a wider perspective on make.
  • There need to be example templates for how to write meeting notes, proposals, etc. The Sustainability team is looking for these tools. Great to have some sort of skeleton of how to run things- centralized tools. No other place for working groups to post thoughts save for the /projects blog, so it’s hard for people to find.
  • Starting to contribute is soooo confusing – who is on it, who has access, still confused, people tell everyone different things.
  • Feedback is given – but there is no action taken afterwards, or so it seems. This can make the community feel disempowered – “why bother to comment, no one listens” while another team is saying the opposite – we need feedback, AND once there is feedback, it needs to be synthesized in a comment on the proposal post with notes on actions taken.
  • Fundamentally dysfunctional – there are secret meetings -instead of asynchronous meetings

IDEA:Design focus pages: A recap overview focus page could be a good path forward for sharing the full picture of what a team is doing (GitHub links, Posts, Slack discussions)

Good Experiences / Positives Experiences

  • Communication in WP involves having a history of discussions. The Make Team Blogs offer access to discussions from 7 years ago, and allow one to see the issues then; use this as an excellent archive.
  • Some individuals who were cross-team minded are able to spend time to bring groups together, but its also a weak link since so much weight is placed on one individual
  • During the contributor mentorship cohort, many teams worked together to support new contributors and create materials
  • Learn Team’s build-out has been astronomical and in future can continue to be translated for a broader audience
  • Easy to collaborate with another team if it’s clear how that team prefers to be contacted (Slack, GitHub, etc.)
  • Local sites now have the ability to have their own make/blog, worked with meta team to get it done. It is good for local communities to utilize this for onboarding, good feel for new contributors to learn how to bring content from wp.org or make/blog to translate.
  • Persistence is very important for teams and individuals; this is what makes things happen; this is the magic.

Best Practices on Make Team Blogs (P2) PART 2:

Sticky note exercise – everyone writes things we should keep doing, stop doing, and 1 action item.

KEEP

  • Openness
  • Wide audience to participate
  • Monthly recap (human touch of summaries)
  • Concept of cross-team communication/collaboration

STOP

  • Only having team reps post
  • Writing proposals that have already been decided
  • The assumption that “lack of response” is consent (lack of engagement). Announce response time remaining in regular meetings. If not objections shared, move forward after that time, but there is always room for iteration
  • No clarity around what is a proposal versus a confirmed project post
  • There is a lot of noise

ACTIONS TO THINK ABOUT

  • Open to experimentation as a community
  • Content in other languages (MLAI services to do that)
  • Automated translations
  • Easier navigation for non-developers
  • Allow the search to scan across all make/blogs, showing GitHub tickets, too
  • Organization to sum up topics (with call for actions)
  • Better guidelines from cross-team collabs
  • Common pool of assets for all teams
  • Proposals voted on – async and live
  • Show excerpts / or provide summaries or overview of all proposals submitted on projects (or in one place)
  • Sharing feedback (and how to give feedback)
  • Have DRIsDRI Directly Responsible Individual - the people who are taking ownership or responsibility for a particular project or feature.
  • Better UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. / 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.
  • Email summary – from teams a member is subscribed to
  • Clarify guidelines on large project decisions – for old and new contributors
  • Single sign-up for updates

DISCUSSION FOLLOWING ^^ THIS

  • What do people think about voting?
  • Making sure community members are involved in the decision-making process vs ensuring we are moving forward
  • Keep in mind the audience of who is reading the post. Sometimes it’s for the team, other times it’s for the wider community. More refined posts announcing features.
  • Why have people begun feeling unsafe to share their ideas? Or that their ideas are not important? People wonder if it it their role? How do we know when and what to post? What makes someone nervous to post? Am I even allowed to post? Should a conversation start in Slack before making a post? Slack is just faster to get a response, so it’s easier to take that road vs make/blog.
  • Why are we using other tools? Fear of pile-on
  • If a decision fizzled out on github or Slack – maybe it is because it needs to be posted on Make Blog, someone might not have access
  • Involving your teammates is a way to post with less fear and feel like you have support behind your thoughts.
  • Profiles might not align – so it looks like you have no credit because it’s in a different place
  • We can build on the ideas on posts (where decisions are made) – leaving a footprint/legacy for future decision. Ex: training team – WP certification (conversation happened about 3 years ago- didn’t go away, had the convo again, still didn’t go anywhere – but it its documented and we were able to build on. So, it wasn’t a wasted post. Can we encourage people who post – that no post is a dud post? Building more value there
  • On learn – we can support by offering: How to write a well-written proposal
  • Tip: Link to ALL of your posts that are relevant – so people can see what was already discussed (Slack, Twitter, etc.)
  • Offer guidance on “How to kick start a working group & How to give good feedback”
  • Proposals that take off – but then fizzle out – but no communication on WHY it fizzled out (there is no communication or follow-up), so there is no closure
  • Summary ideas: Perhaps AI can assist in this summary posting. Design- this was the week’s topic, this decision was made, etc. Something to consider, given that the majority of the contributors are not funded and volunteering their time.
  • Why use that time to publish summaries rather than the project?
  • Sponsors vs individual – sponsored could assist with the “glue work” – not actually doing the “work” but making sure that someone somewhere is doing the work and keeping the community updated on what is actually happening on certain projects.
  • Caution should be exercised when looking at the AI tools out there that could be leveraged…many are not 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., so that goes against the ethos of the project. Find a balance.

THOUGHTS ON VOTING

  • PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. – does formal requests for comments
  • Structure helps get things done
  • End of the month voting on projects (proposals are submitted during the month), then have amendments
  • We are missing constructive debate with yes/no voting
  • We need a space (create a space) to have this “debate” with a deadline
  • Not always a “simple majority”
  • There are by-laws (like 2/3s)
  • Can change per project (only contributors etc.)
  • How would you get past that WP is more of a consensus vs a majority

Questions Raised:

Why are we using so many external tools for discussion (GitHub/Slack) versus the make.wordpress blog?

How do we make sure that all necessary parties are involved in making a decision? If we have a discussion only in Slack, this surely will exclude certain people, however, many people aren’t made aware of the make.wordpress blogs for each team.

Conclusions/Summary:

Onboarding needs improvement so newcomers are made aware of the make.wordpress blog and how it is used across teams, as well as how to get involved in the conversation.

There needs to be more balance with efficiency and flow of posts, especially with proposals. There should be standard guidelines related to comment periods, then follow ups to those posts with information on steps taken or not taken and decisions made.

It’s important to make the planning visible (project boards, etc) across teams
The community needs periodic summaries from each team so they can come in and know what’s been happening and what’s coming next

There needs to be clear ownership and responsibility as this is a positive thing to have (have DRIs)

Invisible and under-appreciated: bolstering “behind the scenes” contributions

From the session page:

A number of teams and their work in the WordPress project currently receive little visibility, but also have high stakes or impact on the health of the WordPress community. Especially in recent years, the contributor pipeline for these teams has faced significant struggles. This discussion will explore how to address the broken pipeline, support the contributors involved, and how to give appropriate appreciation to this difficult work. Examples of teams facing this challenge include Plugins, Support, Security, Incident Response.

Facilitator: @clorith

Notetakers: @harmonyromo and @zoonini

Discussion objectives 

Most open-source projects don’t have enough people to do the work that needs doing. Investing time in recognition means we’re building a strong foundation for bringing in more future contributors.

  • Which groups tend to feel under-appreciated in the project?
  • What are some ways to give more recognition to those teams, both to make them feel more appreciated and also to encourage more people to contribute in those areas?

Key points

Publicizing our work and team makeup

  • Certain teams (like Support) are more public-facing than some which have good reason to be operating more “secretly” – like Security and the Incident Response Team (IRT). How can we bring to the forefront those more behind-the-scenes teams and celebrate their work more?
  • Sometimes we aren’t good about posting our work publicly – very few Make posts from certain teams. Need to keep p2 content fresh to highlight the work we’re all doing.
  • Incident Response Team requires a certain level of confidentiality, which can feel at odds with transparency. They try to be transparent about the process and steps, while balancing confidentiality and transparency.
  • People drawn to Incident Response team maybe don’t care as much about recognition? Could be more tenure-based recognition. 
  • Important for community to know who is on certain teams – makes them more approachable. But there’s a flip side where people could be contacted for the wrong reasons if  their name is public, in relation to these teams they work with. 
  • There’s some particular concern about lack of acknowledgement as it relates to the Security & IRT teams. People only know we handled an issue if we publicize it. So it might make it look like we don’t care about harassment or security if we don’t publicize that we handled certain things. Higher level of risk, a lot less reward. How do we find a balance?
  • Security obviously has to be somewhat obscure, though the team does get recognition for individual work on the team, like when a release comes out. Every problem that’s fixed gets disclosed at that time, and generally the person who found the issue is mentioned. PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party Review team recently announced the people on the team, with their permission. Tricky team because they sometimes get negative feedback, so everyone gets a choice of whether to be mentioned.
  • Discussed some of the other teams and whether/how their team members’ work is publicly acknowledged. Example: Design team creates elements for WordCamps, meetups – a lot of people don’t realize that logos and other design elements require people to create them. Folks need to know that work goes into it. 

Types of recognition

  • Recognition is multi-level, doesn’t just make someone feel good but also shows others that this work is being done, and gives others the opportunity to see a potential place they might be interested in getting involved.
  • Different people want recognition in different ways. Which audience are we aiming recognition towards – peers? People outside of WP sphere? Self-recognition?
  • Credits page in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. ties to release work, so a lot of people involved don’t get recognition. Particular problem with 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 where work is not tied to a particular release.
  • Being asked to get involved with something specific can also have meaning. You’ve been asked to do something because people think you can bring value to something. 
  • Recap posts are a good time to post recognition. Difference in making work visible and being recognized. Event organizers often feel underappreciated but are approached for help so often.
  • Different motives for being involved – i.e. are you sponsored or not? May be more inherent recognition if you’re sponsored. Reward system built in, i.e. your continued employment. People are known internally (within their company) for that part of the project but might not know folks outside of the company who are doing related work on the non-sponsored side.
  • As a fully sponsored contributor, that desire for recognition is also still important to some.

Identify targets

Whose work do we want to show off/lift up/make more visible within the project? Let’s not forget those who do less visible work – are there tasks on teams that have a lower visibility, where the need for recognition is bigger? Also called the “glue” work.

Two types of target audiences to look at:

  • Team-based, like: Support, Plugins, Meta, Security, IRT 
  • Task-based, like: administration, community, triage, mentorship work

Badges/profiles

  • Lots of discussion around profile badges, with some people being more in favour and some less so. Discussed expanding the types of badges offered – for example, could have more “levels,” or even mention specific years in which someone was involved with a particular thing. Additional text could help make badges more meaningful and provide more nuance and context around someone’s current and historic involvement.
  • There was some research done in the past around multi-level badges but the project has been on pause. If we picked it up, it could more adequately reflect people’s contributions. Levels might be easier to assign for some teams than others, because certain types of work are much less quantifiable. Some classification work can be automated, but some can’t, so would it really be the best use of our time?
  • Some badges are more easily earned than others, so a badge doesn’t reflect a consistent amount of work. For example, a Polyglots badge doesn’t differentiate between amounts of work. In Core you can spend weeks writing a feature, and you get a single “prop” alongside others who make much smaller contributions. Committers have the option to give props to themselves, which can feel weird. Community folks have a similar issue – i.e. 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. organizer vs. lead organizer of a 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. get the same badge, but they often reflect very different amounts of work.
  • Teams work differently in terms of assigning badges, you might do a lot of work on one team but not have a badge for it. On some teams it’s automated (i.e. Photos), on others teams it’s manual (i.e. Support).
  • Suggestion for current badge system to link each badge to the Make blog of the team it references, which could give lesser-known teams more exposure.

Sponsored vs. unsponsored/self-sponsored volunteers

  • How do we ensure we have a pipeline of people for tasks that no one typically wants to sponsor, like admin tasks. How do you get past the thinking that admin work is not worthy of sponsorship?
  • Sponsors expect a return on their investment in the form of recognition.
  • Limited time to volunteer, how much are we limiting the base of contributions in general by making it seem you have to understand so much about the organization before you can jump in and volunteer. A lot of time is spent reading and catching up on what was missed or what has changed since the prior time they contributed. May not know how to spend their 2 available hours and thus don’t do it.
  • Volunteers want to do what they enjoy doing, not necessarily what needs to be done in the project. No matter how much we need help with specific tasks, it’s not likely that we’re going to get people to volunteer to work on it if that’s not of interest to them. Different story for sponsored contributors. 

Onboarding new volunteers

  • With recent success of the mentoring program/cohort, is there a way to parlay success into some sort of rotation/sampling as we bring in a more focused mentoring program for new contributors, so those people can get a chance to experience multiple teams? Introduce them to some of these less seen teams, so they can potentially get involved somewhere they wouldn’t have encountered.
  • New onboarding paths across all teams, all have links to “less than an hour” content for getting started. 
  • What are we doing to help people be able to do “drop in” contributions for smaller pieces of work?

Next steps

  • Formally identify target audiences.
  • Investigate status of upgrades to badge system.
  • Look into creating one dedicated questions/getting-started channel 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/. to help overcome the overwhelm people can feel when trying to get started contributing.

#summit, #summit-2023

Community summit discussion notes: Revitalizing contributor teams’ leadership pipeline

Title of session: Revitalizing Contributor Teams’ Leadership Pipeline

Facilitator: @cbringmann

Notetakers: @ninianepress, @peiraisotta

Personal check-in about the topic

How do we feel about the leadership pipeline?

Discussion objectives

  • Identify the challenges to the current leadership
  • Explore motivations for folks becoming leaders
  • Discuss barriers that prevent people from embracing leadership 
  • Brainstorm potential solutions
  • Identify future pipelines

Key points

Identify the challenges to the current leadership

We don’t know what we are doing – things work, but we don’t know why we’re doing specific things.

There’s a different onboarding experience for each team and personal unstructured mentorships, but we don’t know all the things that we have the power to do or all the tools that are available.

Team reps don’t have clear instructions; we have followed some guidelines without knowing the reason why those guidelines are in place.

Burnout and overwhelm are a reality and the confusion doesn’t help.

There’s a particular challenge in understanding what is a “leader” in our ecosystem: 

  • Leadership: whoever is very active in the projects (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. and 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. organizers, folks heavily involved in the releases and projects being sustainable, etc. and not only team reps)

From other sessions we realized the lack of definition of what 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. is, but we know that it’s not necessarily a lead. So, we don’t have a structure to define what a leader is in this community. People who are louder might be perceived as leaders leaving behind other folks. Formally, the only clear definition is a project lead.

Community members expect organizers and team reps to have all the answers, but many times leaders don’t have answers or the power to make the change requested. It causes a frustrating feeling that we do and don’t have the power to create positive change.

There’s a real need for clarity since there’s a lack of documentation for stewardship roles, and people have to:

  • Make mistakes and ask for forgiveness in retrospect
  • Be pushy and take initiative

People expect team reps to move things forward, but there’s no clear way forward often, no documentation, and it’s clear reps can’t do whatever they want. This makes it incredibly difficult to get anything done.

It’s difficult to find people who are willing to share responsibilities in local teams:

  • There’s a lot of focus on global stewardship, but not enough for local communities.

If we don’t have a clear idea about the responsibilities of a leadership role, we can’t onboard new leaders.

New contributors think they can only contribute to small tasks and they don’t realize they can become a team rep.

Leadership onboarding doesn’t exist on all teams and projects.

There’s a lack of connection between local teams and their respective global teams.

Explore what motivates folks into becoming leaders

  • Desire to learn as well as a love of learning by doing, and contributing
  • Desire to support and empower others
  • Maintaining and supporting a local community or project
  • Filling a gap, no motivation
  • Feeling empowered and helping others empower themselves
  • Seeking opportunities to fix things and knowing that we’re making progress (Ex. a high number of closed tickets)
  • Learning how the whole project works – the challenge of getting to learn how everything is connected is the motivation

Discuss barriers that prevent people from embracing leadership roles

  • Contributors aren’t aware about the possibility of growing into leadership roles.
  • The contributor pipelines are clearer on some teams than others.
  • There are knowledge barriers with a lack of documentation on many teams.

Brainstorming potential solutions

  • Better documentation and maybe a few centralized places for the documentation that is needed by different teams:
    • “What is leadership” in General Documentation or the Marketing Team, and maybe linked to team pages on how reps work on their team as well as what the role looks like and what it takes.
    • Further asynchronous discussion will be needed.
  • Request the information that is missing
  • Create an auto-updating chart on WordPress.org or where ever we can find the people responsible of each project and team
  • Leadership training: give contributors the path and tools to develop their leadership skills 
  • Mentorships to help contributors look for opportunities since current leaders can recognize future ones and can help them step into the role little by little
  • Small steps into the role
  • Keeping and maintaining the human component related to leadership without getting lost in process

What are the incentives to being a rep?

  • Every successful contribution helps as a learning opportunity that leaves reps feeling empowered to lead.
  • When a rep is able to lead someone, it further helps develop their skills, which feels great, especially when the project moves forward.
  • Some reps have no motivation to lead, they just became leaders because they were told by others to fill the open, much-needed position.
    • You can lead and inspire without being a rep.
  • In some cases, there’s an aspect of mentorship where if someone notices your hard work and says the role could be a good fit for you, it can snowball; it can be really encouraging and motivating.
  • Knowing your contributions are live for over 40% of the (public) web.
  • You don’t need to be a rep to learn a lot, but it does happen.
  • There are a lot of opportunities on the Test Team and other Teams.
  • You can start to see where there are gaps that need to be bridged.
  • Learning how everything works can be really motivating.
  • Having a role where success objectives are clearly defined such as counting the number of closed tickets is definitely motivating for many.
  • The trust everyone puts in you is empowering.
  • Helping foster a strong sense of community is motivating.
  • Human connection and making life-long friendships.

Identify future pipelines

  • Starting or facilitating meetups and being active in the community can help someone spot you to encourage you into a leadership role.
  • One of the jobs as a rep isn’t just to lead, but to see and encourage others.
  • Mentorships and documentation are key.
  • Create a system to ensure that the current leaders support the next ones by mentoring them and walking them through the leadership path
  • Standardize badge system including leadership badges
  • Standardize training path to leadership (to get the badge folks have to take specific course) and we could use material already available on the Learn platform, or decide what’s needed during contributor days
    • Courses or to-do lists may not be accessible for everyone, unless they’re short and concise
  • Expand and standardize leadership roles to include something like junior and senior reps both globally and per team
  • Offboarding process for when leaders want to step back (information transfers, access removal, etc.)
  • Process to transfer the knowledge 
  • Defining leadership roles is crucial for reps but also for working groups
  • Visuals are needed to understand the structure of everything
    • There’s already a Marketing issue in 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/ for this idea
  • Too much bureaucracy can be a barrier to entry for new(er) contributors
  • Using accessible tools is critical as Google Docs isn’t accessible

#summit, #summit-2023, #team-reps