Nora Ferreirós 12:24 pm on September 13, 2023  

Sustainability Team in the WordPress Community Summit 2023

A few weeks ago, a new edition of the WordPress Community Summit took place, after some years (last one was held in 2017 in Paris). And two of the four Sustainability Team temporary Reps were lucky enough to be chosen to attend: Nahuai Badiola (@nahuai) and myself, Nora Ferreirós (@noradriana). This post is intended to be a summary of our experience there.

What is the WordPress Community Summit?

The WordPress Community Summit is an event that brings together contributors from across the WordPress project with the aim of discussing about how to move it forward. It’s a chance to share and listen to the concerns and thoughts the community has, in a closer and more dynamic way. No decisions are made there: the goal is to spark the conversation and then continue it on Make WordPress Blog. All the sessions and topics that were discussed can be checked in the schedule.

It took place in National Harbor, close to Washington DC, just before the 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. US, and people from (almost) all around the world came to participate. Nahuai and I could make it thanks to the Community Summit travel fund.

Sustainability in the Community Summit

As (rookie) representatives of a new team, our objective was listening what other contributors had to say about the role of sustainability in the WordPress project and team management, and share the learnings of our experience so far.

All the things said during the sessions were anonymously registered by the notetakers (thank you for your great work!). The notes are public and they will be linked and explained further down in this post, but we wanted to bring a summary of our impressions first.

  • Good feelings about Sustainability Team. We received a lot of positive comments and high interest in our team. The contributors we had the chance to talk with (or to listen to) agreed with the need of take care of the WordPress project’s sustainability.
  • What Sustainability Team exactly does? This is probably the question people asked us the most. Contributors agree that a Sustainability Team is needed, but there’s many things that can be understood as sustainability in tech, depending of the point of view. So, confusion is still there, but we are actively working on clarifying our role and scope, and to finally provide an answer to this question. 
  • Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB). We had a whole session to learn more about all the work that lies ahead on this topic from people that really knows about it. During some of our meetings, there have been conversations about whether or not DEIB should be carried by our team or needs a separated one. As this is something that has to be decided jointly, we will share our own thoughts on this when the moment arrives. But we invite everyone in the team to check this session’s notes in order to reflect about it.
  • Improving team management. A lot was said about how to manage WordPress teams in general, and how the Sustainability Team has been managed so far. In summary, we learned that it’s not easy or clear for anybody (there are no guidelines about it yet), and there’s quite a lot of room for improvement also for us.

Notes taken during the sessions and some other

As it has been already said, there are public notes that anyone can check and comment. The following list includes the sessions where sustainability, as a team or as a topic, was mentioned (as far as we know). We invite you to check them and share your opinion.

There’s also a lot of valuable information in other sessions about team collaboration and being 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. that can be really useful for those elected in the vote. We can talk about them when the time comes..

WordPress Briefing

Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune) shared her takeaways from this Community Summit in the last WordPress Briefing episode. You can listen it fully if you are curious about all the event, or you can go directly to 00:06:16 for checking what she has said about sustainability.

If you know any additional content anyone in the community has created about this topic, please drop it in a comment.

A final note

Not all the sustainability areas were mentioned during the sessions but, as we see it, this doesn’t means that they are not important or shouldn’t took into account. We felt the Community Summit as an opportunity to reflect, learn and connect with contributors from other teams, not as a place where decisions where made. The team role should be shaped by its members and everyone who wants to contribute.

Sustainability in WCUS

We have to give a big thank you to @coachbirgit, who lead the Sustainability table at the WCUS 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/.. As soon as she have them, she’ll share with the team the notes of the session. I’ll do my best to update this post with them.

Some people shared with us the intention of talking about sustainability during WordCamp US. We didn’t have time to watch all the talks so we can’t give you a list of the ones in which sustainability was present. But we invite anybody who attended (in-person or by streaming) to facilitate any interesting information they gathered from the event.

Conclusion

This Community Summit was definitely a positive experience for us. There’s so much to say and so much to learn about sustainability in WordPress. But the main conclusion is that, although there is much room for improvement, this team has the support of the WordPress Community. 

So, thank you to everyone that makes this team possible and let’s make WordPress more sustainable together.