Held in Google Hangouts, so the notes might have errors. Please feel free to correct them if so. Also please feel free to add anything that I’ve missed.
Contributor Drive Days (Angela Jin)
Angela – The Contributor Team is talking about Contributor Drives, which are like bite-sized Contrib days where people can get together for a couple of hours and work on projects. She has a basic Google Doc that she will share with any organizer who wants to lead a drive.
She looked at our Handbook and thinks copyediting would be a good thing to start with but wanted our input.
Julie – This is a really good time for this. We are migrating lesson plans into GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ now. So that is something with a low barrier. Contributor Drives could affect the type of screencasts we put out there, tagged to help people.
GitHub Update
Julie is getting Lesson Plans from Make and putting them into GitHub and establishing a workflow that provides the lowest barrier to entry. It’s taking some time because this is an odd use of GH.
Julie is trying to be mindful of how difficult GitHub can be for beginners. Julie is also trying to keep in mind that people might be freaking out when they come in.
There are a couple of screencasts about the verification process, which is a side-by-side comparison of what is in Make vs. GitHub. In this process one would tag or create issues for things, such as missing images or broken links.
Julie has found a solution for icon issue — outdated icons available from Woo Themes that are GPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples.. That’s the big thing that has been keeping us from going at this full bore.
Julie is developing a screencast for how to copy edit a plan. Contributors also can do it by email if they are intimidated by GitHub, and the Training team will put that contribution into a repo. Anyone with a GitHub account should be able to fork the account, make their changes and then ask for a merge.
Beth — We could re-institute the idea of “buddies for new people” — Paul could be a buddy for people new to GitHub.
Julie — Let’s try to get over the fact that GitHub is scary. She has been working on workflows. Things like shortcakes that have come over and need to be turned into icons, broken links, and there are some LPs with images so those need to be pulled over. Once all LPs are verified we need to go back and tag or create issues regarding Out-of-Date, etc.
Beth — is thinking of re-writing the handbook because with her time away she has fresh eyes but knows what we are talking about.
Julie explained for new people that the Handbook is where we are storing LPs even though it is meant to be a handbook for people wanting to contribute to the team. She added that as we verify LPs in GitHub we should put the Make version in draft status to hide it.
Julie — Because we’re using repos The Training Team uses GitHub for working copies of lesson plans. You can find them at https://github.com/wptrainingteam. for LPs there are some limitations on what we can do, so putting an issue on things is the only way we can get those to bubble up.
Beth — I really believe that we shouldn’t be interrupting Julie and Paul’s current flow and they should keep going. Eventually we need a real Handbook.
Paul noted that we can be updating things like Child Themes.
Speaker Training (Jill Binder)
Jill — There is a series of about 5-6 LPs on getting people up to speed regarding speaking and training women’s groups. She’s created slides in google drive because it’s not platform-specific, but we eventually want them in Reveal.js. She no longer thinks Reveal is a great idea because of the technical bandwidth needed to modify slides.
Julie — We have thought of making the “official version” of slides that people could download and make versions. We could create a slides folder or pull request so people can download and share them.
Beth — We should support the ability to find variants of the slides but if we host slides they need to be in Reveal because it’s 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..
Julie — Reveal slides are also more accessible. But whomever is using the slides might modify them into non-official slides and they could be shared also. That would give us multiple versions of slides that can be shared with people who have specific needs.
Julie — We may put an image folder in every repo for images and slides so that it is easier to update.
Beth — GitHub variants of slides should be stored or linked to in the read.me. file. Paul added that the readme should be a table of contents.
Julie — We should allow people to provide files in whatever format they want and it’s up to us to put them into Reveal. People can use the tool they feel most comfortable with.
Regarding a comment from Jill, there will be “recipes” of LPs for workshops on topics (themes, developers, etc.).
Beth — Long-term the idea is that there would be a way to filter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. LPs and workshops by topic.
The style guide will need to be updated for icons, capitalization rules, grammar rules, etc.
