New Theme Review Team Structure

This meeting we had an announcement about the new team structure as well as discussions about the future and the team’s purpose.

Team no longer has leads – the team now has respresentatives and it is a flat team structure with loosely defined roles and responsibilities where individuals can contribute in ways that they feel strongly about.

The Theme Review Team Members page was updated accordingly.

Team Goal:

There were discussions about what the Theme Review team’s purpose was. It is important to have a single collective goal and vision so that everyone is helping to reach it. A possible statement that felt fitting was:

To ensure best practices are followed in themes and that guidelines exist to prevent bad things being a problem users need to face themselves.

@williampatton

The Plugins team statement was shared as well for inspiration.

Ultimately, we need to decide on a goal and focus our efforts achieving it, so that we can keep the team moving forward.

#announcements, #team-reps

Time for a New Team Rep

The time has come again for WordPress community contributor groups to select new Team Reps. The Theme Review Team is looking for someone not a member of the admin group to take on this role.

What is a 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.? What would you be getting yourself into? Essentially, the Team Rep is a PR/communication role. The primary duties of the Team Rep are to post regular team updates on the Make/Updates site (the Theme Review Team posts updates each Monday, and we auto-generate the stats we report), and to act as a liaison between the Theme Review Team and the other community contributor groups. There are infrequent meetings (IRC or Google Hangouts), since sometimes communication is easier outside of the written-only medium of a P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. blog.

Here’s how Jen describes the role:

  • The job description is to post updates and to be a liaison between your team and the rest of the contributor groups via this site. There are a lot of weekly updates, but not so much liaising. When I’ve posted things for comment, it has appeared that people are responding based on their own opinion rather than getting their team’s group opinion and relating it back.

So that’s really it: the Team Rep facilitates communication with other community contributor groups. It really is a great way to contribute without taking on the added stress, responsibility, and commitment of a team leadership role.

Ideally, we would have two: a primary and an alternate; but since @emiluzelac and I have covered both roles since the inception of the Team Reps idea, I’m sure we could continue to cover the alternate rep role should we not find two people interested in stepping up.

Interested? Post comments or  questions below, and discuss!

Edit: if you’re thinking about volunteering, please include your TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. Username in your comment. I know most of the reviewers primarily by Trac Username, which isn’t always the same as your display name here. 🙂

 

#team-reps

Team rep votes are in 27 people voted…

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. votes are in! 27 people voted, with this breakdown of involvement levels:

  • 14 – I am an active member of the 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/ theme review team, and am currently participating in theme reviews.
  • 8 – I am a member of the group, but have not been reviewing themes lately.
  • 4 – I have contributed themes to wordpress.org’s directory, but have not participated in reviewing themes myself so far.
  • 1 – I am not personally involved with the theme review team, at least not yet.

Chip and Emil by a landslide, whether counting only active members or every vote. Chip take the lead first half, then Emil step up. Weekly updates over on make/updates. You know the drill. 🙂

#team-reps

Team Rep Voting

Hello, Theme Review Team! It’s that time again…

Earlier this year, we took a stab at creating a structure for contributor group communication, based on identifying working groups and letting each group elect team reps. All the teams were represented at the community summit at the end of October, which was a huge step forward in recognizing contributors in areas other than coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. That said, once all the reps were together, one of the things we talked about was the idea of team reps, responsibilities, and expectations. As a result, it’s time for a bit of an update there.

Moving forward, each contributor group will have two team reps. We’ll have voting to choose team reps every six months. The idea is that one person will take the lead for the first half of the term with the other person acting as a backup rep, then about halfway through, they’ll swap roles. This way, there’s always someone ramping up with more responsibility, and someone who’s been there still around to lend a guiding hand, without anyone having to make too significant of a time commitment. If one new person takes on 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. responsibilities with each election, then it will be a constant cycle of mentoring people into more responsible roles, which is better for the project long-term than keeping all the responsibility in the hands of a few indefinitely.

It’s important to understand that “team rep” is a role that handles communication (namely contributor wrangling and posting weekly updates on the team’s activity and plans); it is not called “team lead” for a reason. While the people elected as team reps will generally come from the pool of folks that people think of as the experienced leaders, remember that the team rep role is designed to change hands regularly. For example, if in 6 months Ipstenu was ready to step back from being the support team rep, that would not reduce her leadership role on the support team, it would just mean she wasn’t responsible for team rep duties anymore.

Unlike some other teams, which wound up with too many or too few reps, the theme review team has two reps — Chip and Emil — who are around and active in cross-group communication. All teams are participating in this round of elections, but you don’t necessarily have to choose new people as team reps. You’re welcome to vote for one or both of your current reps to continue in the role. One thing to be sure of is that anyone you vote for is actually interested in having the team rep responsibilities until the next round of voting in June; this role has a time commitment attached to it, and if a team rep fails to meet that commitment (not posting the weekly updates, for example) they will be removed from the role. To that end, it would probably help for anyone who wants to be in the running to declare their interest in the comments.

Ready? Go vote for theme review team reps! Voting closes December 15.

#team-reps