Our Strengths and Challenges

Hello all, and thanks for welcoming me so warmly. I’m new to this role of Executive Director, but this is my third year helping our wonderful community work together. During that time, I’ve worked with a lot of teams and have been able to see what seems to be working well for most of us.

For the most part, the WordPress contributors excel at:

  1. Sharing knowledge freely, for the common good
  2. Seeking efficient and effective solutions to complex problems
  3. Communicating courteously in our shared public spaces
  4. Pointing out exceptions and possible risks in implementation
  5. Raising concerns about fairness and possible conflicts of interest
  6. Jumping in to help when the need is great

Working with multiple teams across the project has also given me the chance to identify some things we all struggle with. I’ve received feedback from contributors, too, about where they feel more support is needed. Here are some of the places where I see we (contributors of all types) can have the most impact over the course of the year.

For the most part, WordPress contributors need help with:

  1. Coordinating on collaborative work between teams
  2. Aligning our work better to project goals/values
  3. Understanding team roles, leadership structures, and decision making
  4. Clarifying the differences between open sourceOpen 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. and open commit
  5. Tracking conversations and progress across the project
  6. Raising project-wide concerns more easily
  7. Improving how we recognize and celebrate success

We can start solving some of these things right away (please join me in using this 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/. for talking about project-wide work for starters). Others will take some exploration and planning.

What is missing from this list? What kind of support do you need to do your best work? Which of the above do you think is most urgent? Share your thoughts in a comment on this post

After people have had a chance to weigh in, I’ll follow up with some next steps!