Hi Support Team! A bunch of things today….
Welcome Training to Support
At the community summit, we went a little bit team-creating-crazy. As such, we splintered people into groups (like docs out of support) rather than splintering into projects within larger teams. For Support, this meant that electing team reps was especially hard, since the people getting votes were repping other teams.
One of these new teams, Training, started with excitement but then petered out with no activity for a couple of months. The solution to these two issues seemed pretty clear: merge Training back into Support, and have Christine Rondeau serve as the 2nd team 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.. @ipstenu was in favor, so there we go. Welcome Christine back to the fold!
Christine will be working closely with the Community Outreach group, and we’re starting to plan our first training project already. It’l be focused on Troubleshooting WordPress, aimed at leveling up people to the point that they can do more with WP professionally, and could be more confident contributing to forums. She’ll undoubtedly be asking you all for ideas and help. Note: in line with the diversity initiatives, we’re going to do this first workshop for women, a la railsbridge. It’ll also get posted online for all and sundry.
Contributor Drive
I’ve been scouring every open 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’s community sites to see how they approach things, and one had a great concept that I want us to steal modify, use, and redistribute. 🙂 The idea was this:
Weekend Project: Become a Contributor
We’ve done things like this at WordCamps (usually on dev day, and mostly focused on contributing to core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.), but what I was thinking of for support was something not too intensive: 20 Questions.
20 Questions Proposal:
- Publicize the weekend project to become an official wp forums contributor, called 20 Questions.
- People can sign up to be part of the weekend contributor drive. Current volunteers (approved as knowing their stuff) will be the mentors.
- Their goal is to answer 20 questions successfully (mentor says yes, good answer) during the weekend before the cutoff time.
- Keep at least 1 support person in IRC channel for team at all times during the weekend (make schedule in advance).
- At cutoff, tally the results! People who got at least 20 right are officially congratulated and welcomed as support contributors. We can make a graphic they can put in their sidebars or something maybe. People who didn’t make it are thanked for their efforts, and pointed to resources to help them level up. The person with the most questions answered gets a prize. The person who answered the hardest question gets a prize (so they aren’t incentivized to just do easy ones). We can do wp swag and/or WC tix for prizes.
What do you guys think? I think it would be super fun.
#contributors, #team-reps, #training