Support Team meetup summary for October 22nd

Items discussed at yesterday’s Support team 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..

Wrangling volunteers

1. We want to encourage people to become a part of support and stick around.
2. We want to recognize and let people know when their efforts are good and appreciated.
3. We do not want to create situation where gamification can occur.

Lots of people do provide support in the forums and IRC but burnout is a real thing. It’s easy to become enamored with helping people (or any group effort) but it’s also easy to over do it. Recognizing people’s efforts and encouraging them can help retain people for the long term.

*Re-reads above*

Cheerful reminder: volunteer support is not a job, though some of the problems for the community effort are the same.

Taking breaks and setting your own pace helps anyone who provides support. Part of encouraging people to stick with it is to remind them that they can stop, take breaks or even walk away. The support team is totally cool with that and appreciates all and any time put in.

We also discussed recognizing people people for their work. Part of that is to reply into a resolved topic with something like

Hey, that was a really good thorough reply. Thanks for that, it’s really appreciated.

Or even Tweeting a “Thank you” to them with a link to the topic. Everyone appreciates being recognized and there’s no one who won’t be glad to get a thank you.

Hangout 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/. at WCUS

At last years WCSF the teams had tables for contributor day and a good time was had by all. But not everyone can attend so the idea is to possibly setup an online hangout where people can contribute remotely at the same event.

Yes, The #forums 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 will be used very heavily that day but some sort of video’ish solution would be very cool too.

We also talked about the possibility of doing something like that for the Community Summit but need to check about that. The Community Summit is invite only and is a safe place, meaning no Tweeting, blogging or socializing what is discussed. Having a hangout may not keep with that so that needs to be confirmed.

Read the meetup transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)

#weekly-chat