Community Summit Discussion Notes: Refreshing the contributor pipeline

Title of Session: Refreshing the contributor pipeline

Facilitator: @volkswagenchick

Notetaker 1: @mikachan

Notetaker 2: @evarlese

From the session schedule:

A healthy contributor pipeline requires new contributors! Prior to the pandemic, our in-person events were key to welcoming and engaging new contributors. With events slower to return, how can we continue to connect with and bring in new contributors? This discussion will explore where Make Teams are currently seeing new contributors from, and brainstorm what kind of outreach the WordPress project could do to refresh the contributor pipeline. An additional focus for this discussion will be around how to continually retain new contributors.

Key Points

• Community Team spent 2022 re-activating the community.
• The Docs team is an inspirational team, both in how they attract new contributors and how they support people longer-term 🍪
• The pandemic immensely impacted the community; there is a lot of work done at in-person events and we lost that.
• There is a new Contribute page on Make WP.
  • Ideally, we’d also have a “getting set up” page that includes how to set up 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/., find your team meetings etc.
• There are no longer enough people to help organise in-person events as the momentum has been lost post-pandemic.
• The need to go to the larger WordCamps because the local ones no longer happen.
• People tend to be more passionate at local events.
• Personal connections are important.
• Recent mentorship program has been extremely successful.
• What is the reward? What are people getting from contributing?
  • Reframing why we contribute – what 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. is on a broader scale. You’re helping the wider community, keeping the software free.
• Badges are an under-utilised component, and WP profiles could be improved.
• Lack of contributor data.
• Reframe “office hours” to AMAs – everyone can help everyone, eases the pressure on the usual few people.
• Big challenge is that there is a completely different repo for every single team. Overwhelming. GH and tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. are very overwhelming for new contributions. Do we need some consistency across the different repos?
• We should recruit more contributors from external projects.

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Action Items/Next Steps:

• Create a “getting set up” page alongside the new Contribute page, for each Make team.
• Create a contributor tool CTA that takes people to the Contributor page.
• We also need a clear pathway for people who get stuck or need help – add a direct link to the public-mentoring channel to ask for help on anything from the contributor team handbook pages.
• Recruit more organisers for in-person events.
• What can other teams learn from the Docs team?
• Revisit Google Summer of Code as a way to recruit new contributors. Look for other ways to recruit externally to the WP community.
• Set up support for existing contributors to become mentors to new contributors.
• Be consistent with what’s included on each Make team handbook, how can people ask for help? Add link to mentoring channel.
• Explore introducing a more immediate attribution system – get the “feel good” factor early on in the contributor journey.
• Are there more online workshops that the Make teams can create?
• Break down the large YouTube tutorial videos into shorter videos.
• Can we look into how we can improve the badge system for each Make team? And the WP profile page in general.
• Explore creating events to attract specific types of contributors – e.g. a design event
• Make incentives more transparent, make it easy to find out what people did.
• How can we handle data better? Data can help with the incentives, especially for 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/., similar to a release squad.

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Raw Notes

Discussion points:

• If there are fewer in-person events, how do we connect with new contributors? 
• How do we discuss contributor retention?
• How do we move people beyond Good First Issues and into longer term contributors?
• How do we factor mentoring into the pipeline?
• How do we draw contributors from outside projects? 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., Laravel, etc.

Community Team work:

• Community Team spent 2022 re-activating the community
• There are many different roles in the Community Team, but a lot of work is spread between few people and many members that do not have a lot of time to dedicate to the team
• Team are now creating more structure around new community applications
• Also trying to spread the knowledge to other community members
• Because there were many people involved globally, natural mentorships developed but in an informal way.
• For more formalized mentorship, it’s difficult to find a structure that fits the varying levels of involvement and availability.

Docs team:

• Known to bribe people with cookies! Worked well up until the pandemic.
• Contributor day once a month – the reason that people stick around
• Records all sessions
• In-person events are back, cookies are working again. Works well for new contributors as makes the team more approachable
• Docs team use a cookie emoji to celebrate success, similar to props. Helpful for drawing people in.

The pandemic and WP 5.0 fork:

• The pandemic immensely impacted the community; there is a lot of work done at in-person events.
• We had a disaster recovery plan for almost everything the event series does, except recruitment and retention.
• Community forked WP at 5.0 and then the pandemic happened, bad timing but the community stuck together.

Contribute Make page:

• There is a new page on Make WP: https://make.wordpress.org/contribute/
• The end of the form goes to the “Get Involved” page of the relevant team handbook.
• Ideally, we’d also have a “getting set up” page that includes how to set up Slack, find your team meetings etc.
• Would like help to get this set up – maybe at contributor day
  • We need a path from start to contribution (project wide and individual teams)
  • Call to join contributor day with Marketing team
  • General request to teams to update their “get involved” handbooks

Local events vs WordCamps vs not enough organisers:

• There are no longer enough people to help organise in-person events as the momentum has been lost post-pandemic.
• The need to go to the larger WordCamps because the local ones no longer happen.
• People tend to be more passionate at local events.

Google Summer of Code:

• An area we can look into to recruit students as new contributors.
• Last time we were involved was 2015.

Training onboarding:

• Personal connections are important
• Training team has started a mentorship programme where someone will walk through the process with new contributors
• Personal connections over video and chat, as well as text
• Connecting with users at the start of their journey with using WP, let them know there’s a community that they can get involved with (e.g. Data Analytics and Affiliate Marketing in Japan)

Seville 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.:

• Was the first to happen post-pandemic
• Created a sense of nostalgia and community
• More micro-events are spinning up
• Few developers, more marketers, and content creators
• Like a family, share many moments from previous WCs, more social

Ideas to maintain small local community and WC:

• Set up a monthly meeting on the same day every month, anyone can attend to ask for help with WP sites or any questions.
  • Then create a very small WC, no food no swag.
• Good idea to create office hours for local community, people are very busy so need to plan time in to speak with the community. Encourage people to check in with smaller problems. It’s all maintained by the personal investment of a few people.
• Contributors need several things in place to stay as long-term contributors. Ensure mentors are inclusive so new contributors see people like them. Ensure that different people are rotated through leadership roles.
• The pipeline issue is also a privilege of time.

Mentorship:

• People were getting stuck because handbooks were too complicated
• 50 applicants for the new month-long mentorship program (alongside 6.3 release)
• Of the 13 that were part of a cohort, 11 are now long-term contributors
• Why not create our own version of Google Summer of Code?
• Mentorship works well, would be great to see more teams do this
• We need more people to volunteer to be a mentor
• Some people are already contributors but still feel like they need mentors. We also need something to help build their confidence
• Using terms like freshman, junior, and senior to help people better understand their own level of knowledge.

General discussion:

• Some local groups are so overwhelmed that they don’t have any time to create mentorship programs, etc. These groups don’t have time to be welcoming, so find it difficult to attract new contributors.
• Recording training sessions and having good documentation is a good way to save time helping new contributors.
• Attributions can be a source of frustration when translations or PRs are just sitting in a queue.
• Introduce a more immediate attribution system – get the “feel good” factor early on in the contributor journey. 
• New Contributor Hour to help orientate new contributors around helping out with major releases.
• Are there online workshops that the Make teams can create? Helps people just stumble in and learn as they go.
• Modeling content and knowledge sharing on how tutorials are created.
• People often prefer to attend sessions online rather than in-person – hybrid may be an option.
• Post-COVID has been difficult, because some people don’t want to go back to in-person.
  • Some people prefer to stay home or prefer hybrid events.
• What is the reward? What are people getting from contributing?
  • Reframing why we contribute – what open source is on a broader scale. You’re helping the wider community, keeping the software free.
• Lack of redundancy when leaders aren’t available, address burnout before it happens. Find the feel-good roles, like mentorship.
• Many new people since the pandemic. Many people don’t understand open source. New mindset to encourage new contributors.
  • 24% of meetups turn into WCs before the pandemic – now it’s at 80%
  • Post-pandemic, many people gave up their office space so no longer have anywhere for in-person meetups.
• Badges are an under-utilised component. Marketing team is the only team that has a definition of how to get badges. Currently a mysterious process. Badges are controlled using BuddyPress. Could we utilise the BuddyPress install more? For Groups, messaging? Would mean we weren’t as reliant on Slack, not as dependent on people reading every blog post.
• Drupal also attributes companies as sponsors as well as individual contributors. They also have booths at external conventions to recruit more contributors.
• Ways to attract new people: the next generation of WP project. Create events to attract those types of people – e.g. a design event
• Try to learn the motivations of each contributor, build the pipeline around their needs and their goals without losing focus from the entire project. Let them use us. Let them see what the project can offer them. Give people new roles, reach different goals. Build a stronger system, future-proof.
• We shy away from incentives because it’s non-profit. Make it more clear what contribution involves. Run more team specific cohorts, with mentors and train more mentors.
• Learn skills for free from being a contributor. Getting something done vs making something perfect.
• Lack of data – can we get more data about the number of contributors. How many start contributing, where they drop off, why they drop off. Make the data public. Can be used to tweak existing docs and online workshops.
• The Community team is focusing on NextGen events this year.
  • Exploring events outside of WordCamps or Meetups.
• Remote cities are having to embrace hybrid events – can’t fly people in from far away all the time. E.g. having speakers on Zoom and attendees online has worked really well in the past.
• Reframe “office hours” to AMAs – everyone can help everyone, eases the pressure on the usual few people.
• Drupal Open Social – good way to handle online connections, especially for contributors in isolated locations.
• It’s also helpful to consider building out more cloud-based contribution platforms.
  • Anecdotal experiences about contributing to WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. at Contributor Days and losing a lot of time to setting up the local environment.
• Contributors need to understand what areas need help and where they can help the most.
• We could create case studies to show why people contribute.
• If we can learn the deepest motivation for each of the contributors that join our teams, we can build the pipeline around their goals.
  • Attract new people.
  • Identify their needs and goals for retention.
    • Let new contributors use existing mentors to help guide them towards new opportunities.
  • Create a sustainable system to refresh the pipeline.
• When it comes to retention, two issues can be: people don’t know what to do, or people don’t know when to do it.
• Increase online workshops on the Learn platform to help onboard new contributors. Content doesn’t have to be in English. 
• Room for improvement on setting up development environments for new contributors.
• How are teams following up with contributors after Contributor Days?
  • One idea is to tag issues with the related event. e.g. WCUS2023 GH label
  • Include descriptions of each tag and why you would select a specific tag.
  • Each tag and best practice is explained at the new contributor workshop.
  • Assign attendees and set regular increments for following up, using Slack reminders or calendar reminders.
• Big challenge is that there is a completely different repo for every single team. GH and trac are very overwhelming for new contributions. Do we need some consistency across the different repos?
• Mentors don’t need to be “official mentors” – they can be friends
• No easy way to attribute contributors on smaller projects like themes.
• Slack/trac – tool to help automatically run through #props channel and add people to attributions to the specific projects – drupal-slack-parser
• When people don’t know how to do something, they go to YouTube.
  • If you search “How to contribute to WordPress” the first video is almost an hour.
  • Could we improve this or reach audiences this way?
• Burnout often happens when there are a lot of expectations, but not enough autonomy to resolve those problems.
  • With enough autonomy, people often resolve those problems themselves.
  • It also happens due to folks going back to the same person over and over if they’ve said “yes” in the past.
• Could we revamp the default text on WP installs to encourage people to contribute?

Tips:

• Data
  • How can we put together data in contributions? 
  • What do we do with the data, e.g. share at State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/.?
  • How many issues are worked on at a specific event?
  • Iterate on the data we do have.
  • Data can help with incentives. 
• Examples of the Training and Docs teams:
  • Embrace online entry points with Welcome videos.
  • Recognition early on.
  • Add contribution workshops to the Learn platforms.
  • Break up contribution videos so they’re more accessible on YouTube.
• Teams can help build out the Get Involved Handbook pages.
  • Update the sample page to introduce people to how to contribute.
  • Standardize the pages.
  • Make sure they’re updated and accessible.
  • Explain how people can ask for help.
  • Mentorship channels both for mentees and mentors.
• Preventing burnout.
  • Help prevent burnout by giving key contributors more autotomony.
  • Invite legacy contributors to become mentors.
  • How can we build cohorts with redundancy?
  • How can we build more autonomy into open source to help prevent burnout? How does it fit into OSS culture?
• Mentor the mentors.
  • Build the mentor pipeline through both WordPress and outside communities.
  • Start friend groups, similar to cohorts, to encourage people to contribute to specific tasks.
• Share/highlight success stories.
  • Can this help with corporate sponsorship?
  • How do we convince companies to participate in sponsoring contributors?
• Make incentives more transparent.
  • What do you get from contributing?
  • Credibility, building your resumé, hard skills.
  • Define what it means to earn a badge on each team.
• Invite adjacent tech to WP-related conferences to share knowledge across communities.
• Create events that attract the people we want to contribute.

#summit, #summit-2023