Community Summit Discussion Notes: Refining Five for the Future For a Robust WordPress Community

From the session schedule:

The Five for the Future (“5ftF”) program can help ensure the long term health of WordPress’ contributor pipeline. To make 5ftF as effective as possible, strong participation from 5ftF companies and project-wide understanding of Make Team needs and priorities is required. As such, this discussion will focus on two related topics:

  1. How we can more readily identify priority needs and opportunities and match them to 5ftF contributors.
  2. How to incentivize and facilitate further participation to the 5ftF program.

Facilitator: Jeff Paul (@jeffpaul)

Notetaker: Kim Coleman (@kimannwall)

Problems

Trying to get strong participation from 5ftF companies

  • IDEA: to help bring in more contributors would be stats beyond what we see that encompass other areas outside coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. contribution
    • Dashboard post on upgrade
    • For their role, they have to get “proof” on contribution, particularly when it isn’t an obvious core contribution.
    • Sponsoring “non-staff” and how that is not always recognized in SOTW
    • Idea of sprints, where companies can use a focused window of time to contribute – how would they swing in and make impact.
    • Sponsor people rather than weekly/monthly, do it based on release.
  • When trying to seek sponsorship as a non-sponsored contributor, trying to find a company to sponsor them is a challenge. Especially for a non-developer, non-designer.
    • IDEA: could we expand on how you can be a “sponsor” of 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., could we offer something similar for 5ftF / sponsoring contributors.
  • Could companies start looking at specific tasks/areas of need and sponsor people without making them “employees”. There is a fear there for making someone an employee, rather than just sponsoring a set number of hours for a specific time. How could we facilitate that?
  • Important for transparency: time budgets. Currently just DIY.
    • “I’m giving this much” – looks nice, but it isn’t truly accurate, both as a sponsoring company and as individuals.
    • This is a point of frustration as there is no accountability for that.
    • Ties into the dashboards and tracking.
    • Sponsored vs. not sponsored is moot without the trust and accountability of actual time spent. How can team leads actually manage and know the time people are spending and how.
  • Accountability currently depends on your honesty to commit to do those X hours.
    • Keep up your word.
    • Maybe you work less one week, maybe you work more another to make it up.
    • Sometimes people pledge and underdeliver.
    • Other times, people just don’t know how to start / where to go.
  • Is it a marketing issue? Why should companies contribute? Why should companies participate in 5ftF?
    • Currently having one on one conversations with clients to encourage them to participate – to contribute.
    • There’s a ton of business value to contributing, we have to tell that story.
      • When you contribute, you get to know what is happening with WordPress.
      • It helps you make your own products better.
      • It helps your get better at what they do.
    • Could we give (for small agencies) a way to pitch contributing to their customers.
  • 5ftF shows the people and the companies, but it doesn’t show the outcome/the deliverables.
    • This is more seen once you move outside the space of being a contributor, you realize this is a problem.
    • Show what’s been done.
    • This project needs X hours. Who could contribute?
    • If you sponsor it, you can get highlighted as sponsoring it / having done it.
    • It’s hard to point to a “result” when things don’t ever reach there. It’s often a moving target.
    • Maybe better to highlight work being done / progress vs. complete outcomes.
  • 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. / Marketing Teams are splintered:
    • There’s the 4th party people in the teams
    • Sponsor people in a closed-off team (marketing in particular). “Leadership component” of the team.
    • Meta and Core have a big mix.
    • Elephant in the room: it isn’t equal in terms of influence and leadership.
    • Taboo to say specific company names. Can we even identify that?
    • People are moving around between companies and may have had multiple experiences – so we should avoid calling out these taboo things so as not to be confrontational.
  • How can we “demystify the job description of a 5ftF contributor”

Project-wide understanding of Make Team needs and priorities

  • Community Team, Core Team, Marketing Team have more sponsored contributors, Docs team is perceived as and very well may actually have fewer.
    • Companies with a lot of money and want to put it into the project don’t know where to put it to make the biggest impact on the project.
    • Is there a way to funnel the companies with the money to support a part time contributor to be a full time.
    • The documentation is perceived to have a huge need, which is insane for the size of the project.
    • IDEA: fill the gap between companies with money willing to contribute vs. where to put it / where is there a need.

Discussion Objectives

The problems we think exist

  • More part time contributors vs. part time – diversity, less impact on the companies
  • Teams need “Dashboards” (reporting metrics).
    • What the needs are
    • What’s getting done
    • Orgs need a clear channel of communication of what those needs are.
  • Is every make team actually set up to have a robust (fast!) onboarding process and is it realistic that companies can drop ship people into teams.
    • How can the team leads manage this?
    • How can we prepare our teams to be ready for this kind of “influx”.
    • We could use some standardization for this. Handbooks.
    • Some people may feel overwhelmed by onboarding and then leave.
  • “Updates page” is a bit chaotic.
    • Make teams are supposed to update it.
    • It could certainly be improved on.
  • 5ftF isn’t just companies.
  • Could we move 5ftF to the Sustainability team?
  • 5ftF has “meetings”.
    • Maybe no one knows about this.
    • “We didn’t know what to tell about what.”
  • Disconnect between sponsorship community
    • “full time sponsored people” have their own secret channel. Maybe this is ok but there are no connections and the information isn’t shared.
  • Companies sign up and don’t know what to do.
    • “Call for testing”, “docs”.
    • What teams need help is a recurring theme.
    • Shadow/sharing how other companies do their 5tfF in house.
    • Could companies share ideas on how they can set things up.
  • Issue – people are “saying” they are pledged for something, and they aren’t.
    • People are gaming this in a not great way.
    • “Design” is a notorious one of these.
    • The current system allows this.
    • Needs to be fixed.
    • That would help us see the REAL gaps.
  • IDEA: start from scratch.
    • Message to all the people who have already pledged.
      • Are you already comfortable with your contribution? No – begin a nurture campaign around the individual steps.
    • 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/ is potentially scary for non-devs.

How we can more readily identify priority needs and opportunities and match them to 5ftF contributors?

  • Each team has the ability to pitch projects somewhere and somehow.
    • Companies can browse this
    • “Pitches” with time frames
    • Experiment
  • Onboarding process is unclear. Each team works individually and it isn’t transparent.
    • How do they disclose projects, how do they onboard?
    • “Which team do you want to contribute to?”

How do we incentivize and facilitate further participation to the 5ftF program?

  • IDEA: Private 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 so companies that are sponsoring / participating could see the current opportunities.
  • Current 5tfF program targets large companies/huge agencies.
  • Isn’t transparent who the contact is for the 5ftF organization.
  • Organizations are receiving an email to say “are you still doing this?” – Yes / No. Who’s replying?
    • Could we also share an email “here’s how to meet your requirements”.
    • X team needs Y.
  • “Incentives” is a broader issue
    • What is 5ftF
    • Why would a company want to participate?
    • Companies are perhaps less motivated to contribute in ways that don’t have a road toward helping them. I.e. docs is not going to help the company but code toward a new extension that could make an APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. that the company itself needs is worthwhile.
    • Could we gamify it?
    • What benefits are you getting aside from being listed on this page.
    • How to incentivize not only joining but also so they stay.
    • Documentation, for example, doesn’t have authorship.
      • They use props and team badges.
      • If I already have this, what can I get next to be recognized and keep contributing.
    • BuddyPress could be used for the gamification.
  • Transparency about “what WordPress needs”.
    • Companies want to make contributions that are valuable to WordPress.
    • Time is limited so individuals are making their own decisions as to where their impact is needed most.
  • Incentive for hosts would be more ways to collaborate specifically about central WordPress issues for hosts.
  • Dedicated mentorship?
    • User journey.
    • Could this be one on one, onboarding especially for companies or self sponsored contributors to find their way.
    • Contributor Orientation
      • Give contributors all the information that we can.
      • They won’t read 27 handbooks.
      • People come in and say “I want to help? Where do you want help?”
      • Team lead takes a lot of time documenting all the different things.
      • Where do the leads put the information which is already in the handbook? Job board?
      • Even if it was perfectly documented how to join, how to help, what you should do, what is expected, there is no where to send it.
  • As a community team member, they try to share it to their local camp sponsors/companies.
    • Many do not have someone within their team. Some are kind of adjacent to the WordPress community.
    • Asking “who could I sponsor?”
    • Hoped for a simple form or page that they could pick and choose and send money. Doesn’t exist but just an experience to share.
    • Could WordCamp organizers include 5ftF in their sponsor onboarding?
      • Bosses aren’t here at WordCamps learning about these things.
      • But it is a C-level decision.
      • We need to give individuals the tools to pitch up to their 
  • Other 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. projects make the company-level incentives more specific.
    • Some projects have actual contribution tracking.
    • If companies are active, they get more involvement in commentary on proposals.
  • IDEA: One for the Future (aka 1ftF)
  • Contributor FAQ is an unpublished document on the make blogs.
    • There are third party solutions for this.
      • Are they global?
      • GitHub does have a sponsorship system. Sure. But whatever we used would have to be a global system (all currencies, all regions, no one unable to participate).
    • The foundation may not facilitate this.

#summit, #summit-2023