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: 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

Team Reps

Note from Jane: These notes are from 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. summit that happened the weekend before #wpcsWPCS The collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) used to format and validate PHP code developed for WordPress according to the WordPress Coding Standards. May also be an acronym referring to the Accessibility, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc. coding standards as published in the WordPress Coding Standards Handbook.. More information about the outcome of this talk will be posted soon to 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/.

How were people chosen to be team reps?

Every contributor group were surveyed (via p2 and/or mailing list) to choose team reps (primary and backup). The 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. team was slightly different in that the group was not very active at that time, so the responses were low, but the selection was Jane and Helen as second. Since Jane was organizing it, Helen was chosen as a CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team rep, and the UI team had devolved into mostly CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. (dev), no UI team reps were assigned.

Core devs have team reps including long-time core committers, highly experienced devs with commit access, experienced devs without commit access, and devs new to contributing. This overweighted the team rep group in favor of core devs. Also, since people were voted in, roles have changed. Agreed to reduce the number of core dev reps to two, just like all other groups.

Sometimes roles change (like Mika, who’s been working on plugins as well as support). People should, ideally, just be responsible for one thing. How regularly should we revisit who the reps are? Should we time it with release cycle, or make it time-based? 6 months, timed with calendar, not release cycle seems most attractive.

After the summit, Jane will post about another voting round – whittle down the core dev reps, revisit UI/events/etc, and announce the new round of elections.

Term limits. Is it best to switch team reps every term? This can be a good way to encourage people in your team to step up. Another idea is to have a team rep and a rep-in-training, so that the alternate rep can be learning and training before they take on the team rep responsibilities.

Do you lose team rep status based on poor performance? If team reps miss weekly updates or monthly chats, should they be asked to step down? Alternate reps should represent the team if a team rep can’t make a monthly hangout or weekly update. If the whole team can’t post/represent for 2 weeks straight, then they need to re-assess the reps.

What teams are light and need to be recruited for? Mobile, international, accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), and security (new team!).

Are there any teams we don’t have that we should? WordPress.org team (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.) for sure. UI could use more designers. Support could use more people and documentation writers. It would be a good idea to make documentation a separate group.

Agreed to close voting on December 14 for the next round of team reps to start on January 1, allowing for a 2-week orientation and training/getting up to speed.

It needs to be emphasized to the community that the team rep position is more about communication and project management, not necessarily prestige. Let’s keep assessing our processes and structure, and make iterative improvements.

#contributor-groups, #team-reps, #teams