As many of you know the past week the team met along with with WordCamp 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. San Francisco and the summit. We had 2 days where a group of us across all roles met together and talked through everything we’d posted previously as an agenda.
I’m going to be posting every meeting here. But, there are no names against any comments. This is important as we made sure we had a safe place so that everyone could communicate equally. I am excited to share with you all the notes from each meeting. We had a wide range of people there, from different roles, different experience, different companies, different countries. Please respect though that everything people said or did was with the mind of progressing the team. Whilst I am writing the notes, this is also not my voice alone.
So, lets get on and as it’s already been announced I’m going to post my notes from the Communication review meeting first.
Questions:
What is/isn’t working? Mailing list, IRC, make.blog.
How can we make things better?
Should we have a monthly hangout?
People are upset by mailing list. People are stopping being reviewers because of it.
There are lots of stories of people who have found the mailing lists an issue.
It is a format that simply doesn’t work for a large amount of people.
It is a format that makes even following it hard for many.
We can’t please everyone, but we are causing a place where it does more harm than good potentially.
Lack of human contact – don’t see face, don’t see voice.
Easy for people to get hurt and upset.
Hard to moderate or encourage.
Everyone around table didn’t like mailing list in current state.
Every single person without hesitating said yes to the mailing list being closed.
Lets just try something different.
We need consistency.
Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. should be used for short format, for messages, for quick asks. Make.blog should be used for longer conversations.
People need to take things to make.blog more.
Slack needs more people as a presence if it fills the instant message gap.
Make blog access could be more for people. We need to split the roles so that more people can have.
The process will be fluid. Lets review what works, lets not.
Meetings will change to have a mentor meeting. Office hours aren’t working.
Hangouts are something we should experiment with.
People should be using trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. more than the mailing list – lets make sure ticket conversations stay in tickets.
We need more people to come to the meetings. Lets do that!
Whatever we do should be seen as able to be changed. Lets review and not set in stone.
From this we created some actionables. We have done the big one here and closed the mailing list.
ACTION: make sure that we refer people to Slack in documentation.
ACTION: everyone here today will have make access. We will sort out roles so can make sure people don’t have access beyond that.
ACTION: make a make blog post so that people know what they have access to once this happens.
ACTION: mailing list to be closed and to move to Slack and make.
