Angela Jin 8:46 am on February 1, 2021

Call for Volunteers: Creating a Learn WordPress Course on Open Source Leadership

With the launch of Learn WordPress, the WordPress 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. project has a highly useful way of offering important resources to all contributors. Leadership training is an excellent way for any community to develop valuable skills (like stronger communication and collaboration, or strategic decision making) and can lead to a more sustainable community with greater representation. While there are multiple paths to leadership in the WordPress project, providing central training can provide greater insight into the leadership qualities that have proven to be particularly effective and aligned with the WordPress mission, and community values when it comes to working together.

What would this look like?

Like other Learn WordPress courses, a WordPress Open Source Leadership course would comprise lesson plans, recorded workshops, and quizzes. The course would cover a series of topics, such as:

Open source principles
Strategic planning
Best practices in communication
Managing open-source projects
Building psychological safety as a team
Creating welcoming and inclusive spaces
Giving and receiving feedback
Collaborating with volunteers
Maintaining accountability
Encouraging diversity and inclusion
Fostering innovation in open-source
Effective mentorship
Conflict de-escalation
… and more!

After this course is created, contributor teams could organize cohorts to go through the course together, host discussion groups, and learn leadership skills together!

How you can help

There are two ways anyone can help!

The first way is to provide feedback. What other topics do you think we should include in the course? Please share your thoughts in the comments by Friday, February 12, 2021.

Another way to help is to help create the course! Everyone interested is welcome to contribute, although it is particularly helpful if you already have experience with:

WordPress leadership
Understanding of open source principles
Familiarity with writing lesson plans
Experience with recording or editing workshops

Depending on how you want to help, and how many topics we decide to cover in the course, this project could take a few months to complete, and might ask around 1-3 hours of your time each week.

If you are interested in building out the lesson plans, recording workshops, and writing quizzes, please let me know in the comments below, or reach out to @angelasjin in the Making WordPress SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., also by Friday, February 12, 2021.

+make.wordpress.org/training/

Muhammad Yeasin 8:55 am on February 1, 2021

Highly Interested 🙂
- Angela Jin 12:11 pm on February 1, 2021
  
  Great, thanks for the interest! 🎉
webcommsat AbhaNonStopNewsUK 1:27 pm on February 1, 2021

Hello Angela, marketing would be interested in working with you on this. Are you planning to incorporate @chanthaboune’s excellent five pillars to contributing model she has been working with make teams on? It would also be good to tie in the self-training courses available for organizers and give them more promotion.

We would also suggest incorporating consistency about how we use leader given the previous discussions and how we have approached this in Learn WordPress, so we can make it more inclusive showcasing vast opportunities to contribute, not over burden people, and tie in with previous agreed wording. Many thanks for bringing all this together.
- Angela Jin 1:38 pm on February 1, 2021
  
  Hey @webcommsat, I’m so glad marketing is interested in helping out! By “five pillars to contributing”, I think you are referring to what is also called the “five stages of volunteering”? I could definitely see that incorporated into the topics listed!
  
  If anyone is curious about what the “five stages of volunteering” are, check out Josepha’s WCUSWCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event. 2017 talk on the Five Stages of Volunteering
  
  I’ll reach out in the marketing channel to better understand wording, and also how the marketing team would like to participate. Thanks! 🙂
- Andrea Middleton 11:51 pm on February 3, 2021
  
  I don’t think we should try to avoid using the term leadership or leader when building this course.
  
  While the question of “who appoints leaders” in a project like WordPress is complicated, I don’t think that encouraging the use and growth of leadership skills is complex or nuanced at all. Excellent leadership skills in all contributor levels and positions will support WordPress’ success. WordPress is a great place to grow leadership skills, and I think this is one of the greatest unsung benefits of the WordPress contributor experience.
Andrea Middleton 10:57 pm on February 2, 2021

I’m very interested in helping work on this! Count me in!

Just so I don’t forget these ideas in the meantime, I think a workshop on collaborating with volunteers should probably include content on recruiting, onboarding, resiliency planning, and training your replacement(s).

If we could create one, I’d love to have a workshop on resilient & effective process and/or program design for WordPress contributors, as well.
- Angela Jin 10:45 am on February 4, 2021
  
  Love these ideas, and am so glad you are interested in helping to make this happen!
Carike 3:08 pm on February 5, 2021

I believe that the most fundamental question is:
“What should leadership look like?”

I originally typed that as “What does leadership look like?” but I do not honestly believe that those two questions are currently the same thing in the context of .org
Part of leadership is being able to honestly examine painful failures and learning from them.

Currently, Learn only recognizes the workshop presenters publicly.
While I am seldom harsh, it is my belief that this points towards a leadership failure.
While it was accepted without question that all contributions (including subtitling) need to be recognized once it was brought up at the meeting, leadership means seeing the needs and desires of others pro-actively and being responsive to that.
Unfortunately, this is not limited to one team. The TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket to automate Forum badges is still open.
Leadership is fighting to make sure that every contributor gets recognized fairly – not just fighting until you have received recognition yourself.

Leadership in an 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. context is about accepting responsibility.
Sometimes it means taking the brunt of others’ frustrations, even if it wasn’t you who caused the problem – and especially in cases where you are responsible.
It is not shifting the blame (and particularly not shifting the blame to unpaid volunteers) when things go wrong.
There is a whole lot of taking one for the team.

One day before the hard launch of Learn, 40% of the lesson plan content was randomly unavailable. It took me some very annoyed growling to actually get that fixed. I don’t like growling.
While I am mostly okay with not getting credit as long as things get done, don’t think I have not noticed that no MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. props were awarded for contributions to the Learn site – or that others would continue to contribute in similar circumstances.
Leadership in an Open Source context isn’t glamorous. It isn’t going on podcasts and advertising your own personal brand, while the service itself is still fundamentally broken.
While rapid cycles of “iterate” is valuable, when you are presenting something to external users, it needs to be minimally viable.
Leadership is not going “Oooooh, pretty, shiny!” and looking for the newest, most visible thing.

Leadership is knowing about when to step back – but not so far away as abdicate your responsibilities.
Leadership in Open Source is not about managing people.
To be someone’s manager means that they are being paid and that they have to follow all reasonable instructions from you.
Leadership in an Open Source context is inspiring others and being willing to let your ideas grow up and leave the house and live happy lives with new people.
- Angela Jin 2:40 pm on February 9, 2021
  Thanks for sharing all these thoughts, @carike! I like this question of “what does leadership look like” in particular, and I hope that everyone who reflects on that question can also think of good examples of leadership qualities or skills. Many of the items you describe resonate with me, such as:
  - Transition of leadership
  - Inspiring and creating new leaders
  - Mentorship best practices
  - Active listening
  - Showing appreciation for teams and members
  - Handling challenges and failure
  These are all valuable in 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. spaces. One goal that I personally would like to see come out of this training course is that people feel empowered to better define their best leadership qualities as well, and that they can level up those skills together.
JenniferSwisher 6:02 pm on February 10, 2021

Definitely interested in participating in this! On board to help with lesson planning and creation!
- Angela Jin 7:04 pm on February 11, 2021
  
  Yay! So happy to hear you’re interested in helping with this!